If I have to be a soldier I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable

Walking abroad, one is the admiration of all little boys, and meets an approving glance from every eye of elderly.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Children are not meant to be studied, but enjoyed. Only by studying to be pleased do we understand them.

I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.

I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.