Wilfred Owen
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.Collection: Home
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.Collection: History
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.Collection: Death
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.Collection: War
Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.
All a poet can do today is warn.
Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill.
The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.
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.
All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.
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.
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.
All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.
Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.
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!
Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.
I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.
I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?
I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.
If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.
Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.
She is elegant rather than belle.
I am marooned on a Crag of Superiority in an ocean of soldiers.
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 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.Collection: War
The old Lie:Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.Collection: War
All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.Collection: Truth
Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.Collection: Stones
If I have to be a soldier I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkableCollection: Soldier
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.Collection: War
These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.Collection: Men
No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.Collection: War
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.Collection: War
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.Collection: Smile
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.Collection: War
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.Collection: Dream
I, too, saw God through mud - The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.Collection: Children
Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill.Collection: Bullied
My subject is war, and the pity of war.Collection: War
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.Collection: Night
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. The old lie: It is sweet and fitting that you should die for your country.Collection: Country
Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Missing
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet'sCollection: Boys
Those who, like the beasts, have no such Hope, pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.Collection: Age
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.Collection: War
Winter Song The browns, the olives, and the yellows died, And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide, And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed. From off your face, into the winds of winter, The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing; But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter, When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing, And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.Collection: Beauty
I, too, saw God through mudCollection: War