"I would say that my aims of writing this book are less concerned with the facts of history than with the truth of art."

“The servicemen of the 1939 - 45 war could not be disillusioned because they held not illusions to start with, the most common mood found everywhere was one of dour resolution, skeptical, resigned.”

“Past events are not dead but constantly making their claims on the present, modifying it even as they themselves are modified in the maw of subsequent events and in the memory which is part of the shaping of imagination.”

“The poet , absorbed in the solving of formal problems, the struggle with slippery eels of language, has no time for dissimulation and he tells us more about himself than he knows.”

“The proper act of reading of a poem was not an act of passive submission but one of collaboration with its author.”

“The authentic British poetry of the second world war was not a poetry of protest, still less was it inspired by patriotic enthusiasm”

“The word experiment derives from 'experimentum' - that which has been experienced and what , for the writer , has been experienced is the work of his great predecessors”