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.
Wilfred Owen

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.
Wilfred Owen

All a poet can do today is warn.
Wilfred Owen

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

All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.
Wilfred Owen

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

Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill.
Wilfred Owen

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!
Wilfred Owen

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

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


I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?
Wilfred Owen

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

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

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

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

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

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

She is elegant rather than belle.
Wilfred Owen

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

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.
Wilfred Owen