These are all poems by Siegfried Sassoon about his experience in the First World War. Most critics agree that, of the war poets, Sassoon was good but not as good as Wilfred Owen, who was killed the week before the war ended. Certainly Sassoon never wrote such good material again: the war was his subject and his post-war work is unexceptional. However, I prefer his work to that of Owen: Owen is a more skilful poet but I think Sassoon captures better the rage and fury of the ordinary soldier, the inarticulate conscripts he gave a voice to. There is a superb Oxford University site on Wilfred Owen, consisting of seminars on his work, links to related pages, and, best of all, a wonderful collection of Owen's manuscripts, both his poems and his letters to friends and family, which make fascinating and tragic reading. Well worth checking out, but be warned - you'll spend all day there. Another excellent Web resource on the First World War generally and war poets specifically is available by clicking here.

Sassoon (and Owen) spent autumn 1917 in an army psychiatric hospital in Craiglockhart, Scotland, to which Sassoon was sent after writing an impassioned article accusing the British government of betraying its soldiers by fighting on instead of negotiating a peace with the Germans, turning what was presented as a war of deliverance into a war fuelled by a lust for conquest. Pat Barker has written a wonderful trilogy about the Great War (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road) of which the first book centres on Craiglockhart in that brief period and the work done there by W.H.R. Rivers, an Army psychiatrist. Read it. One of the best books I have ever read, it casts an uncanny spell, drawing you wholly into its world, so that when you look up you are shocked not to find yourself in 1917. It also casts a fascinating light on Sassoon's poems from this period (and Owen's - it was Sassoon, meeting Owen here, who encouraged him to write about the war in the first place).

One of Sassoon's poems here, Repression of War Experience, echoes the title of a paper delivered by Rivers on shellshock and his treatment of it. I found this paper on the Web and simply ca'n't remember where, so I ca'n't credit whoever put it online in the first place. But thank you, whoever you are!

Sassoon wrote various volumes of autobiography, including Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress (fictionalized accounts of his war experience), and Siegfried's Journey; his diaries have also been published, which are well worth reading even if you've read the memoirs. His love of nature and his joy in the world around him come through more clearly in the diaries, and it's easier to see why towards the end of his career he likened himself to religious, nature-loving poets like Marvell and Vaughan. For example, until I read the diaries I had always thought "To Victory" sat uneasily with his more cynical, bitter later poetry, and indeed Robert Graves (another poet, and a great friend of Sassoon's during the war) derides it in his autobiography as unrealistic and naive. Now it's one of my favourites - it's Sassoon the man rather than Sassoon the soldier coming through. See what you think.

All of Sassoon's war poetry is available online (as well as many other fine works of literature) at the Bartleby Library- do take a look if you want to read more.

I've put in some other First World War related poems at the end, and started off with a poem not by Sassoon at all but by Philip Larkin, which I think is the best description I have come across of what happened in 1914 - the chasm, which suffuses WWI poetry, that opened up between our age and the age that preceded it, and which the men (and women) who lived through the war had to try and bridge.

Women writers have tended to suffer from neglect in studies of WWI writing. Of course, it was the men who endured the agonies of the trenches, but many women went out to France as volunteer nurses (VADs) and had to cope with the aftermath of battle; and there were the thousands and thousands of women left at home worrying about their husbands, brothers, lovers, waiting for the dreaded telegram, scanning the casualty lists in the newspapers...Vera Brittain's famous book about her experiences as a VAD, Testament of Youth, is perhaps the best-known work of a female writer about this period; there is also a book called Scars Upon My Heart which collects the poetry of some women writers at the time, from which the following two poems are taken.

I don't think this next one is a very good poem, but I should have liked to have met the man who inspired it.

The terrible thing is, it wasn't a heritage of peace at all that he laid but the roots of another war - and that little boy would have fought like his father a few decades later.

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