The War Poems. Siegfried Sassoon

At the dawn of World War I, a young English poet exchanged his pastoral pursuits of cricket, fox-hunting, and romantic verse for army life amid the muddy trenches of France. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) began the war with a sense of noble enterprise... Read more

At the dawn of World War I, a young English poet exchanged his pastoral pursuits of cricket, fox-hunting, and romantic verse for army life amid the muddy trenches of France. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) began the war with a sense of noble enterprise and fought fiercely, earning the nickname Mad Jack for his daring, near-suicidal assaults on enemy lines. His growing disillusionment with the tactics employed by the British army and with homefront profiteering culminated in a different act of courage: In 1917 he published an open letter proclaiming his willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. Sassoon's epigrammatic and satirical poetry conveys the shocking brutality and pointlessness of the Great War. This collection comprises his greatest and most moving works, including Counter-Attack, 'They', The General, and Base Details. It traces his journey from idealism in the mode of Rupert Brooke, another poet of the era who wrote of the glories of war, to a new dimension of tragic wisdom-as reflected by a slogan that circulated among the British troops: Went to war with Rupert Brooke, came home with Siegfried Sassoon. Less