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.

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!

All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.

Flying is the only active profession I could ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.

The old happiness is unreturning. Boy's griefs are not so grievous as youth's yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.