As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,

The main impetus behind Edward Thomas`s No One So Much as You, is to describe his experience of love:

No one so much as you
Loves this my clay,
Or would lament as you
Its dying day

While the motive behind Andrew Young`s, On the Prospect of Death, is self-evident.

If it should come to this
You cannot wake me with a kiss
Think I but sleep too late
Or once again keep a cold angry state

Personal motivation is an essential characteristic of literary writing. It is the engine behind creativity, and the last two extracts provide examples of some of the great themes which occur again and again, not only in literary writing, but in all the arts; love, death, war, and peace. Such themes, it seems, provide perennial inspiration for artists.

So perhaps an inventory of literary writers` motives should include the overflowing of their passions, their desire for self-expression, an abiding fascination with humanity in all its variety, the need to come to grips with relationships as they really are in the world as it really is, the striving after an ideal world which can exist only in the imagination, and, perhaps at the heart of it all, the need to form, shape, things of beauty.

The artist needs to resolve conflicts within himself, to reach an understanding, to search for some credible meaning of to life, to death, to everything. He is always reaching, fumbling toward some sort of truth; a