Isaac Rosenberg

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

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 never joined the army for patriotic reasons.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

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

Nothing can justify war.

Poetical appreciation is only newly bursting on me.

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.

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

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