You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.

Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views.

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.

To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.

We once discussed which were the cleanest troops in the trenches, taken by nationalities. We agreed on a descending-order like this: English and German Protestants; Northern Irish, Welsh and Canadians; Irish and German Catholics; Scots; Mohammedan Indians; Algerians; Portugese; Belgians; French. We put the Belgians and French there for spite; they could not have been dirtier than the Algerians and the Portugese.