War Poetry

War Poetry Synopsis

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born on September 8th 1886. There was nothing of German heritage in his genes his mother merely liked the title name of Wagner's opera. He was educated at The New Beacon Preparatory School, Sevenoaks, Kent; at Marlborough College, Marlborough, Wiltshire and at Clare College, Cambridge, where from 1905 to 1907 he read history.

He left Cambridge without a degree and spent the next few years hunting, playing cricket and writing verse. Motivated by patriotism, Sassoon joined the British Army shortly before the outbreak of war. A broken arm delayed his transfer to the front until November 1915.

Siegfried was sent to the 1st Battalion in France. There he met Robert Graves and they became close friends. United by their poetic vocation, they often read and discussed each other's work.

Siegfried soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely:

• from a romantic sweetness to an increasingly discordant beat, conveying ugly truths of the trenches to a readership sated by patriotic propaganda. Details such as rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide are all trademarks of his work at this time, and this philosophy of 'no truth unfitting' had a significant influence on Modernist poetry. Sassoon's bravery was inspiring. He often went out on night-raids and bombing patrols and demonstrated ruthless efficiency as a company commander. Deepening depression at the horror and misery the soldiers were forced to endure produced in Sassoon a paradoxically manic courage, and he was nicknamed "e
• Mad Jack"e
• by his men for his near-suicidal exploits. On 27 July 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross. He continued to write for the rest of his life but because of the courage of his War Poetry it is for those lines he is most vividly remembered. Here we publish many of those War Poems. Perhaps war has never been seen through such eyes before