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Quotations by Wilfred Owen 22 Found Born: Saturday, March 18, 1893 A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season. After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve. All a poet can do today is warn. All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want. All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me. Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose. Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill. Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote! Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War. I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness. I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry? I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law. I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's. If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both. Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do. She is elegant rather than belle. The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head. The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter. Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom. When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to-it leaves nothing. |
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