The War Poems - Hardcover

Sassoon, Siegfried

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571130100 ISBN 13: 9780571130108

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1983

Synopsis

"The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon" is a collection of British war poems that doesn't mince words about the horror of infantry combat. Sassoon's poems drip with bite, sarcasm, and some bitterness, but at the same time they are elegantly rhymed and the images are powerful. The World Wars marked the end of innocence for many, and the poets who wrote of their war experiences brought home the irony of that innocence in the face of the devastation that was wrought. A note Sassoon wrote on one of his poems is particularly enlightening: "I haven't shown this to any clergyman. But soldiers say they feel like that sometimes." The writing in "The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon" is poetry that grabs and moves the reader, letting them see some of life's darker experiences. For those who wish to understand what war really was, as well as be motivated to avoid it when at all possible, this collection is well worth reading.

About 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

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0571130100
• ISBN 13: 9780571130108
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160
• Editor: Hart-Davis Rupert