Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"For his generation, the poetry and career of Siegfried Sassoon were emblematic of the ways in which the secure truths of Western civilization were destroyed in the hopeless foxholes of the First World War. It is difficult to imagine the works of Virginia Woolf or Hemingway or Faulkner existing without him. . . ." --
Graham Christian, The Boston Phoenix
About the Author
The celebrated British poet, editor, critic, novelist, and diarist Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) enlisted for military service on the first day of World War I; his friends in the service included Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen. Sassoon's war poems were originally published in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). After the war, he went on to write several other books of poetry and criticism, as well as six volumes of prose autobiography.