Here again is Louise Simpson speaking about military experience.
Most of the hard and dangerous work of the world is done by such men. During the war, I learned to respect them and have done so ever since. I have earned my living by teaching in universities. The people around me, with a few exceptions, could not understand the basis of my thought that words to me were pale in comparison with experience mattered only insofar as they transmitted experience.
One evening at dinner in New York, a woman told me that she thought it terrible that I, a poet, had been in the war. She had a son who was about to enter Columbia, and he would never take up arms. No, I thought some other man will do his fighting for him.
Tags: On Writing