Siegfried Sassoon etablierte sich als eine Schlüsselfigur der Kriegslyrik, dessen Werk tiefgreifend von den Schrecken des Ersten Weltkriegs geprägt war. Während seine frühen Verse pastorale Themen erkundeten, entzündeten seine Kriegserfahrungen ein starkes Engagement für die Darstellung der brutalen Realitäten und der Sinnlosigkeit des Konflikts. Sassoons unverwechselbarer Stil zeichnet sich durch beißende Ironie und ein tiefes soziales Gewissen aus, was ihn zu einem bedeutenden Chronisten des Schicksals der Soldaten machte. Seine Gedichte bleiben ein starkes Zeugnis menschlichen Leidens und ein zeitloser Appell für den Frieden.
The book is a facsimile reprint of a scarce antiquarian work, preserving its historical significance despite potential imperfections like marks and flawed pages. It aims to protect and promote important literature by providing affordable, high-quality modern editions that remain true to the original text.
For "The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon," Sir Rupert Hart-Davis has arranged the poems as far as possible in the order of their composition. A useful Biographical Table is also included, so that students, scholars, and other readers can trace the movement of the soldier alongside the mind of the poet. Fourteen of the poems in this volume are published for the first time.
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston includes Sherston's Progress and both Memoirs,
Propped against the bank, his blond face undisfigured, except by the mud which I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my coat sleeve. Anyhow I hadn't expected the Battle of the Somme to be quite like this. This first-hand account of the face of battle is as beautifully written as it is historically significant.
Sassoon's fame as a novelist and autobiographer, and the success of his posthumously published Diaries, have somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. Apart from the famous War Poems of 1919, which firmly established his reputation, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. This collected edition represents his own choice of the poems he wished to preserve. It was first published in 1947 and subsequently enlarged to include the late poems in Sequences.
George Sherston develops from a shy and awkward child, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare. The world he grows up in, of village cricket and loyal grooms, had vanished forever by the time Sassoon wrote this book, but he captures it with a lyricism and gentleness that defy nostalgia. A bestseller on publication in 1928, this superb evocation of the Edwardian age has remained in print ever since. It was the first volume of a classic trilogy, completed by Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress, that charted both the destruction of the world for which Sassoon fought, and his own emergence as one of Britain's finest war poets.
