The Real War Poets Are Always War

The Best Of Causes Ruins As Quickly As The Worst; And The Road To Limbo Is Paved With Writers Who Have Done Everything I Am Being Sympathetic, Not Satiric For The Very Best Reasons.

Most Of The People In A War Never Fight For Even A Minute Though They Bear For Years And Die Forever. They Do Not Fight, But Only Starve, Only Suffer, Only Die: The Sum Of All This Passive Misery Is That Great Activity, War.

I Think Miss Moore Was Right To Cut "the Steeple-jack" - The Poem Seems Plainer And Clearer In Its Shortened State But She Has Cut Too Much... The Reader May Feel Like Saying, "let Her Do As She Pleases With The Poem; It's Hers, Isn't It?" No; It's Much Too Good A Poem For That, It Long Ago Became Everybody's, And We Can Protest Just As We Could If Donatello Cut Off David's Left Leg.

An Intelligent Man Said That The World Felt Napoleon As A Weight, And That When He Died It Would Give A Great Oof Of Relief. This Is Just As True Of Byron, Or Of Such Byrons Of Their Days As Kipling And Hemingway: After A Generation Or Two The World Is Tired Of Being Their Pedestal, Shakes Them Of With An Oof, And Then - Hoisting Onto Its Back A New World-figure - Feels The Penetrating Satisfaction Of Having Made A Mistake All Its Own.

We Always Tend To Distrust Geniuses About Genius, As If What They Say Didn't Arouse Much Empathy In Us, Or As If We Were Waiting Till Some More Reliable Source Of Information Came Along...