Nothing can justify war.

You mustn’t forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had.

I wanted to write a battle song for the Judeans but so far I can think of nothing noble and weighty enough.

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.

I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.

I never joined the army for patriotic reasons.

Nothing can justify war.

Being by the nature of my upbringing, all my energies having been directed to one channel of activity, crippled from other activities and made helpless even to live.

I can only say that one’s individual situation is more real and important to oneself than the devastations of fates and empires especially when they do not vitally affect oneself.

Poetical appreciation is only newly bursting on me.