Siegfried Sassoon War Poet

Epigrammatic and bitterly satirical verses by the well-known English poet convey the shocking brutality and pointlessness of World War I. Includes "Counter-Attack," "They," "The General," "Base Details," and other poems.

Though Siegfried Sassoon would argue the point throughout his life, most critics regard his war poetry, written during World War I, as the best of his writings. Like many of his artistic contemporaries, Sassoon embraced the "Great War for Civilization" with great fervor, and it was this passion that he brought to his earliest writings about the war. "Absolution," his first war poem, published in 1915, summed up his feelings: "fighting for our freedom, we are free." Fighting on the frontlines, Sassoon soon came to the conviction that his war for civilization was anything but civilized. And thus his writings took on a new tone, courageously denouncing a conflict that was no longer about "defense and liberation" but was for "aggression and conquest." Through primary documents and extensive research, the current work provides critical analyses of Sassoon's war poetry. Detailed examinations of each of the so-called trench poems show how the poet and his poetry were transformed through his wartime experiences and give the rationale for the critical consensus that the Sassoon canon is among the most significant in the literature of modern warfare.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon" by Siegfried Sassoon. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This book presents a cognitive stylistic analysis of the writing of Siegfried Sassoon, a First World War poet who has typically been perceived as a poet of protest and irony, but whose work is in fact multi-faceted and complex in theme and shifted in style considerably throughout his lifetime. The author starts from the premise that a more systematic account of Sassoon’s style is possible using the methodology of contemporary stylistics, in particular Cognitive Grammar. Using this as a starting point, he revisits common ideas from Sassoon scholarship and reconfigures them through the lens of cognitive stylistics to provide a fresh perspective on Sassoon's style. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of stylistics, war poetry, twentieth-century literature, and cognitive linguistics.

Epigrammatic and bitterly satirical verses by the well-known English poet convey the shocking brutality and pointlessness of World War I. Over 80 works include "Counter-Attack," "They," "The General," and "Base Details."

This book encompasses the complete life and works of Siegfried Sassoon, from his patriotic youth that led him to the frontline, to the formation of his anti-war convictions, great literary friendships and flamboyant love affairs.

Siegfried Sassoon is mostly remembered for the devastating poetry he wrote during World War One as a result of leading his troops "over the top" to certain death. This episode in his life--when he was sent to military hospital suffering from shell-shock and his heroic return to the Front--is covered extensively in his own writing, and has overshadowed his later literary output. But his more mature poetry is resuscitated in this sensitive, exhaustively researched biography. As well as recounting the friendships "Siggy" famously had with fellow poets Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, Roberts delves into the more private arena of Sassoon's covert homosexuality and his ill-fated marriage. We learn about Sassoon the passionate golfer and bloodthirsty fox-hunter, all of which adds greater depth to this complex man. Roberts also digs deep into his subject's psyche to reveal a fixation with father figures which started during the War when he was under analysis (and arose from the early death of his father); and uncovers new sources of information concerning Sassoon's conversion to Catholicism. This fresh material means that the earlier life is somewhat neglected, but, then, as Sassoon himself said "My real biography is my poetry."

This autobiographical novel of the eminent English poet, Siegfried Sassoon was first published in 1936. Following on from Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Sassoon’s third and final instalment, Sherston’s Progress, is set in an asylum for shell-shocked officers, and deals with the author’s final acceptance of these realities, and ultimately to resolve his emotional turmoil. Sassoon’s fluid, sensitive prose, the fine perceptions of the poet, is spoken here in the voice of the average man. With charm and humor and quiet understatement, he has managed to articulate the hidden feelings of any sensitive man who in the normal course of his life is suddenly exposed to the nightmare of war. A gripping finale to the trilogy.