Quotations

“The sensations of going over the top are about as exhilarating as those dreams of falling over a precipice, when you see the rocks at the bottom surging up to you.”

Comparing an infantry attack to the helpless terror of a falling dream · Letter, 14 May 1917

Wilfred Owen

“For twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes, where at any moment a shell might put us out.”

Recording the exhausting and precarious conditions of prolonged front-line service · Letter to Susan Owen, 25 April 1917

Wilfred Owen

“I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt.”

Conveying how the presence of death could be sensed even without being seen · Letter to Susan Owen, 19 January 1917

Wilfred Owen

“I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience.”

Grounding knowledge in lived experience rather than authority · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter I: Of Understanding

E. Nesbit

“A five years' march down the wrong side of the hill tells more than ten on the right side.”

A vivid reflection on how ageing seems to accelerate · Letter to Sophia Scott, 3 April 1820

Sir Walter Scott

“But from that evening some floodgate had broken in me and I was beginning to be awake.”

Describing the transformative effect of discovering a living community devoted to poetry · Memoir, The World at My Shoulder, 1938

Eunice Tietjens

“I believe that travelling is as much a passion as love, poetry, or ambition.”

Recognising exploration as a powerful form of human desire · Landoniana

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“Nobody's experience ever suits us except our own.”

Wryly suggesting that wisdom borrowed from others rarely feels sufficient · Landoniana, from Romance and Reality

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“Childhood, more than any other period, links its remembrance with inanimate objects, perhaps because its chief pleasures are derived from them.”

Observing how childhood memories become attached to places and objects · Landoniana, from Romance and Reality

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“Experience of life has been my chief earthly teacher, and one gains that every day.”

Valuing lived experience as a continuing source of wisdom · Letter to Mrs. George Payson, 31 October 1875

Elizabeth Prentiss

“Much of my experience of life has cost me a great price, and I want to use it for the strengthening and comforting of other souls.”

Turning hard-won experience into consolation for others · Letter to Mrs. Condict, 7 November 1875

Elizabeth Prentiss

“I knew anybody could go to camp in the sunshine.”

Finding humour and adventure in setting out despite unpromising circumstances · Essay, I Go to Camp, 1934

Gwendolyn B. Bennett

“To say that I was surprised and ashamed is to put it mildly.”

A candid expression of embarrassment and self-awareness · Letter to Joshua Bennett, May 17, 1925

Gwendolyn B. Bennett

“Even frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait at the sign of The Ship and Turtle will not enable one to write sea poetry.”

A comic reminder that literary authenticity cannot be acquired through superficial acquaintance · Essay, Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“A poet need not confine himself to his individual experiences; the world is all before him where to choose.”

Defending imaginative freedom while recognising that some subjects demand genuine understanding · Essay, Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“Daybreak at the seaside or up among the mountains is sometimes worth while, though familiarity with it breeds indifference.”

Suggesting that even natural beauty gains force from rarity rather than routine · Essay, On Early Rising, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“What the poet reads, sees, and feels, goes into his blood, and becomes an ingredient of his originality.”

Describing originality as the transformation of experience and influence rather than creation from nothing · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“Ask yourself whether he is not partly right, whether you yourself could love a country and a people who had treated you as herein stated.”

Inviting readers to judge his protest by imaginatively placing themselves within his experience · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

Charles Frederick White

“The author's own experience is here but briefly told and these writings are based upon actual facts”

Insisting that the anger in his writing arose from lived experience rather than abstraction · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

Charles Frederick White