All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.

The war affects me less than it ought. But I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled.

The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.

Those who, like the beasts, have no such Hope, pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

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.

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