Over 100 short poems written between 1915 and 1919; plus a handful from 1926 and 1933.

Sassoon's anger builds and builds, and he is utterly withering by the end. These poems say more than any biography could about the man.

It's an extraordinary collection, particularly for a British reader for whom the First World War is regarded as unmitigated lunacy. Look no farther than Blackadder Goes Forth for a very British interpretation.

More than once I read a verse and had to put the book down beside me. War, in all its horror, condescended, captured, and retold. And, to one side, a warning of the ways of the ruling class given dominion. ( )

My favourites are two contrasting ones: “The General” with its simple trusting soldiers whose general “did for them both by his plan of attack”, and “Everyone Sang”, a poem of pure joy.

Loved it - Sassoon is surgical in the precision with which he characterises human feelings and emotions, the futility of the war, its blind cruelty, and how in the end soldiers keep fighting because of the loyalty they feel to their companions also thrown in what is perceived quite clearly as a senseless butchery.

There are so many verses to quote, so many striking poems that the only thing which makes sense is to read them all - however I found the one below incredibly prescient, and think it should be compulsive reading in all schools


SONG-BOOKS OF THE WAR
In fifty years, when peace outshines
Remembrance of the battle lines,
Adventurous lads will sigh and cast
Proud looks upon the plundered past.

On summer morn or winter’s night,
Their hearts will kindle for the fight,
Reading a snatch of soldier-song,
Savage and jaunty, fierce and strong;

And through the angry marching rhymes
Of blind regret and haggard mirth,
They’ll envy us the dazzling times
When sacrifice absolved our earth.
( )

A collection of the poems Siegfried Sassoon wrote about World War I. Very thought-provoking in their observations of a war that Sassoon hated and yet felt compelled to support. A very sad commentary on war from the pen of a participant.
Wonderful poems, though. ( )

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

A body of poems emerging from Sassoon's experiences in the World War I trenches. They demonstrate a bleak realism and contempt for war leaders, which were at first unacceptable to a rather reverential public. Sassoon's reputation did not begin to flourish until well after the War's end.