War Poetry Quotes

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

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.

No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets' view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,And speed glum heroes up the line of death.

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

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

My, how beautiful is war! its songs, its leisure!

How red the rose that is the soldier

Our poetry emulates the recent progress in military strategy: Our army's strength is the foot soldiers.

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,Raged at his breast, gulped and died,Do not weep.War is kind.

Blue is the smoke of wrar, white the bones of men.

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow: In Flanders fields.

I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.

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.

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.

Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack.

There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button the bright splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep. War is kind.

It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event.

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.