My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. The old lie: It is sweet and fitting that you should die for your country.

These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law

I, too, saw God through mud

Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

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.

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