Wilfred Owen Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.

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.

Those who, like the beasts, have no such Hope, pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

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!

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.

All a poet can do today is warn.

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.

The old Lie:Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.

These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

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

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

Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

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

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.

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.

I, too, saw God through mud

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