Soldier

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

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

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

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

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

All theological lore is growing distasteful to me. All my recent excursions into such fields proves it to be a shifting, hypothetical, doubt-fostering, dusty, and unprofitable study.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.

Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

She is elegant rather than belle.

All a poet can do today is warn.

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

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

I am marooned on a Crag of Superiority in an ocean of soldiers.

Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.

When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to - it leaves nothing.

After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death... The marvel is we did not all die of cold.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.