Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. - Stephen Spender

The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other.

After the first powerful plain manifesto The black statement of pistons, without more fuss But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.

All that you can imagine you already know