The art of poetry belongs to life; one lives for it just as other people live for their essential vocations of whatever kind they may be. It is one’s… - Siegfried Sassoon

An innocent youth wrote recently that he is convinced I am the greatest writer in the world (from New Zealand). A touching letter – so simple & unaffected. Another young man wrote, only yesterday, that I am to him what Hardy must have been to me. Such tributes are worth having, aren't they, even if I don't deserve them.

His face - what would it have become? While calling him back in memory I have been haunted by the idea of the unalterable features of those who have died in youth. Borne away from them by the years, we - with our time-troubled looks and diminished alertness - have submitted to many a gradual detriment of change. But the young poet of twenty-five years ago remains his world-discovering self. His futureless eyes encounter ours from the faintly smiling portrait, unconscious of the privilege and deprivation of never growing old, unconscious of the dramatic illusion of completeness that he is destined to create.

But death replied: “I choose him.” So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.