The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (Dodo Press) - Softcover

Sassoon, Siegfried

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1406538701 ISBN 13: 9781406538700

Publisher: Dodo Press, 2007

Synopsis

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (1886-1967) who wrote under the pseudonyms Pinchbeck Lyre, Sigma Sashun and George Sherston was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I, but later won acclaim for his prose work. Sassoon was born in the village of Matfield, Kent, to a Jewish father and a Protestant English mother. He studied both law and history from 1905 to 1907 however, he dropped out of university without a degree and spent the next few years hunting, playing cricket, and privately publishing a few volumes of not very highly acclaimed poetry. Sassoon joined the military just as the threat of World War I was realised. He soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely. Sassoon's periods of duty on the Western Front were marked by exceptionally brave actions. The war had brought Sassoon into contact with men from less advantaged backgrounds, and he had developed Socialist sympathies. Amongst his famous works are The Daffodil Murderer (1913), The Old Huntsman (1917), Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918), Picture-Show (1919) and The War Poems (1919).

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Dodo Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1406538701
• ISBN 13: 9781406538700
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 84