“To be so closely caught up in the teeth of things that they kill you, no matter how infinitesimally kill you, is, truly, to be a poet: and to be a poet in fact it is additionally necessary that you should possess the tongues and instruments with which to record this series of infinitesimal deaths.”

—  George Barker

"Therefore All Poems Are Elegies" in New Poems : 1940 : An Anthology of British and American Verse (1941) edited by Oscar Williams, p. 15

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British poet 1913–1991

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