Unseen Sassoon poems shed new light

Unseen Sassoon poems shed new light NEWS

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Previously unseen poems written early in Siegfried Sassoon's deployment reveal a very different viewpoint than that he known for in his famous poetry on the futility of war.

Sassoon's biographer, Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson, has discovered new poems buried in the author's trench diary from January 1916. Instead of the viewpoint we've come to know from the poet, they demonstrate that, at first, Sassoon saw war as a heroic undertaking.

Sassoon is famous for his anger-filled prose about war, such as The Hero, where a mother is told of the death of her son and Suicide in the Trenches.

'It surprised me because we always had this idea that Sassoon, when he went out to France, would have changed instantly from his heroic ideal of war to an anger that burst over into his poetry,' Moorcroft Wilson told the BBC. 'So when he gets there you're not surprised to find him talking about the trenches. But when I found this trench diary, after the angry war poems I found there were poems that were full of the glory of war and the idea that war is a heroic venture.'

Sassoon joined his battalion in France in November 1915 and was sent home to England to recover in 1917 when he was wounded by a sniper. After being sent back to England, he wrote his famous declaration against the war, where he wrote 'I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust'.

'It's very, very different from 'O Christ Almighty now I'm stuck',' said Moorcroft Wilson on the new poetry discovered.

'You and the winds ride out together / Your company the world's great weather / The clouds your plume, the glittering sky / A host of swords in harmony / With the whole loveliness of light flung forth to lead you through the fight,' wrote Sassoon, while the glory of war was still fresh in his mind.