Guess quote

Wilfred Owen [1893-1918] English

Rank: 101
Poet (with poems), Poet

Modernism, War

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, MC was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon, and stood in stark contrast both to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke.

Poetry, War

Quote	Tags	Rank
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.	Poetry, War	101
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!		102
Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.		103
I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?		104
If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.		105
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.		106
Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill.		107
Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.		108
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.		109
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.	Poetry	110
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.		111
Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.		112
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.		113
All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.		114
All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.		115
I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.		116
All a poet can do today is warn.		117
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.		118
Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.		119
She is elegant rather than belle.		120
The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.		121
I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.		122

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