At present, I am a poet trying to be a soldier. To tell the truth, I am not interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful … The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over — a century after it is over.

A letter home, included in Joyce Kilmer, Poems, Essays and Letters (1918) Edited by Robert Holliday