i reserve comment on the aids issue, apart from agreeing (generally) with aps, especially on the AFA booth at nation04 issue. homosexuality's been around a long time (as long as heterosexuality, one might say), and repressing it certainly isn't going to go any way in raising aids awareness, much less changing the nature of society.

anyway.

i am beginning to dislike yeats, claud! (no personal offence intended. i will get over this--am merely being defensive over my dear wilfred.) he called owen's poetry "blood, dirt, and sucked sugar-stick". aestheticism huh. "a lonely impulse of delight." "in balance with this life, this death". at the same time you've got the disabled, and the mental cases, and dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. the mud and the blood and the reality, "bitter as cud".

anyway. do you know i dreamt of owen the other night--it was a nice dream involving kayaking and companionable silence. clearly i have been holing up in the library reading up on ww1/ wilfred owen too much.

incidentally does anyone know of good war poetry that isn't from ww1? walt whitman wrote some poems based on his experience in the american civil war.. but i don't -really- like his writing (generally i think i prefer english poetry). i have keith douglas on ww2. there's also hardy, who wrote before ww1. auden wrote on ww2.