Items related to War Poems Of Siegfried Sassoon

War Poems Of Siegfried Sassoon - Softcover

 
9780486437156: War Poems Of Siegfried Sassoon
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 
At the dawn of World War I, poet Sassoon exchanged his pastoral pursuits of cricket, fox-hunting, and romantic verse for army life amid the muddy trenches of France. This collection of his epigrammatic and satirical poetry conveys the shocking brutality and pointlessness of the Great War and includes "Counter-Attack," "'They," "The General," and "Base Details."

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:
Sassoon, who lived through Word War One and who died in 1967, was, as the introduction to this book tells us, irritated in his later years at always being thought of as a "war poet". Understandable perhaps from the point of view of the poet: readers on the other hand might wish to demur. The poems gathered here and chronologically ordered, thereby tracing the course of the war, are an extraordinary testimony to the almost unimaginable experiences of a combatant in that bitter conflict. Moving from the patriotic optimism of the first few poems (" ... fighting for our freedom, we are free") to the anguish and anger of the later work (where "hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists / Flounders in mud ... "), there comes a point when the reality of trench-warfare and its aftershocks move beyond comprehension: Sassoon knows this, and it becomes a powerful element in his art. As a book, the images have a cumulative relentlessness that make it almost impossible to read more than a few poems in one sitting.

Unlike the avant-garde experiments developing in Europe in the first decades of this century, Sassoon's verse is formally conservative--but this was perhaps necessary, for as one reads the poems, one feels that the form, the classically inflected tropes, the metre and rhyme, apart from ironising the rhetoric of glory and battle were necessary techniques for containing the emotion (and indeed, a tone of barely controlled irony may have been the only means by which these angry observations would have been considered publishable at the time). When Sassoon's line begins to fragment, as it does in several of the later poems, it is under the extreme pressure to express the inexpressible. Compassion and sympathy are omnipresent here, in their full etymological sense of suffering with or alongside others--something the higher echelons of command (those " ... old men who died / Slow, natural deaths--old men with ugly souls") were never able or willing to contemplate. But Sassoon intuited the future of warfare, could sense that this was not "the war to end all wars": the mock-religious invocation of the final poem prefigures the vicious euphemisms of more recent conflicts: "Grant us the power to prove, by poison gases, / The needlessness of shedding human blood." Sassoon's bile-black irony signals a deep-felt pessimism: it was with good reason. --Burhan Tufail

Review:
"In later years, when Siegfried Sassoon had written much else in prose and verse, he was annoyed at always being referred to simply as a war poet, but it was the Great War that turned him into a poet of international fame, and I feel sure that his ghost will forgive me for thus bringing together these magnificently scarifying poems." --Rupert Hart-Davis, from his Introduction

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherDover Pubns
  • Publication date2004
  • ISBN 10 0486437159
  • ISBN 13 9780486437156
  • BindingMass Market Paperback
  • Number of pages113
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781603862844: The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9781603862844
Publisher: Merchant Books, 2010
Softcover

  • 9781449588830: The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon

    Create..., 2009
    Softcover

  • 9780571240098: The War Poems (Faber Poetry)

    Faber ..., 2012
    Softcover

  • 9780486826820: War Poems (Thrift Editions)

    Dover ..., 2018
    Softcover

  • 9781406538700: The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (Dodo Press)

    Dodo P..., 2007
    Softcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Stock Image

Sassoon, Siegfried
Published by Dover Publications (2004)
ISBN 10: 0486437159 ISBN 13: 9780486437156
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0486437159

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 73.03
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: £ 3.17
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Sassoon, Siegfried
Published by Dover Publications (2004)
ISBN 10: 0486437159 ISBN 13: 9780486437156
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0486437159

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 76.39
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: £ 3.37
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Sassoon, Siegfried
Published by Dover Publications (2004)
ISBN 10: 0486437159 ISBN 13: 9780486437156
New Paperback Quantity: 1
Seller:
Wizard Books
(Long Beach, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0486437159

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 80.89
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: £ 2.77
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds