“How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the solider dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.”

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,
Inevitably modulating, in the blood.
And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the solider dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

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Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955

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