Remarks by Robert Nichols | V2Melody Quotations

“It was written by a man for mankind's sake, that might once more become that which is humane not an empty phrase.”

Presents Sassoon's book as an appeal to recover the meaning of humanity · Introduction to Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 1918

“The words of Barbusse placed at the beginning of this book should be engraved over the doors of every war office of every State in the world.”

Urges official memory of war's moral defilement rather than its pageantry · Introduction to Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 1918

“You can't even think of paradise when you're in hell.”

On why Sassoon's later war book almost abandons the earlier pastoral manner · Introduction to Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 1918

“I remember I nodded, for further acquaintance with war inclines me to his opinion.”

Records his shift from the exalté note of Ardours and Endurances toward Sassoon's refusal to praise war's supposed gains · Introduction to Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 1918

“While war is a possibility man is little better than a savage and civilisation the mere moments of rest between a succession of nightmares.”

Treats peace as interruption rather than the settled condition of states · Introduction to Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 1918

“War doesn't ennoble: it degrades.”

His own verdict after nodding agreement with Sassoon that even the hardening of the individual soul is not worth praise · Introduction to Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems, New York, November 1918

“He speaks our language better than we do merely because he is more skilful with it than we are; his skill is part of our skill, his power of our power.”

Treats poetic gift as a heightening of shared speech · Introduction, Ardours and Endurances, 1917

“We are so impressed by the power of poetry that we think of it as something made by a wonderful and unusual person: we do not realize that all the wonder and marvel is in our own brains, that the poet is ourselves.”

Places the poet among ordinary speakers rather than above them · Introduction, Ardours and Endurances, 1917 (quoting and endorsing Mark Liddell)

“They are gathered together because the book affords an opportunity to record appeals which are—save in one or two cases—to scarcely tangible emotions: those emotions which float across the mind like Coleridge's cloud, thin and pale and very high, and are of import to the very few.”

Defends slight, elusive feeling as a proper subject of verse · Prefatory note, The Budded Branch, 1918

“These poems form some slight memorial of an intimacy with Nature which War has destroyed since I now see Nature as the Great Indifferent.”

Records how combat altered his earlier communion with the natural world · Prefatory note, The Budded Branch, April 1918

“I am just finishing my Faun's Holiday. I wish you were here to feed him with cherries.”

A pastoral flourish written while Graves was still at the Somme, later answered in verse · Letter to Robert Graves, early 1917

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