Sassoon

Peter Brobbey

Introduction to Poetry

The Trauma of the First World War: A Soldier and a Civilian’s Perspective

On August 4th, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany in response to events leading up to, and following, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. The war was dubbed “the war to end all wars” and the human cost was immense; by the Armistice of November 11th 1918 almost 9 million lives were lost, including 780,000 British.  When war broke out, literary and poetic trends were romantic, pastoral works, but the horrors of war and human loss, combined with patriotic, disillusioned propaganda poetry, provoked trench poets such as Siegfried Sassoon to write satirical, somber poems detailing the realities of war. Specifically, the outcry of trench poets, like Sassoon, against the efforts of pro-propaganda poets like Jessie Pope was a unique phenomenon caused directly by the atrocities of the world’s first large-scale, modern war. Their poems challenged those of past writers like Alfred, Lord Tennyson that glorified the valor and honor of battle as well as the sentiments of contemporary pro-war propaganda poets like Jessie Pope. However, it was not only servicemen who were enraged by the realities of war and propaganda; writers such as Helen Hamilton, a woman with no firsthand experience of war, directed poetry at authors who glorified war and mocked civilian men. The trauma caused by the First World War is exemplified by the derision and outrage that anti-war poets like Sassoon and Hamilton express in their poems “Glory of Women” and “The Romancing Poet” towards the sentiments of pro-war poets like Jessie Pope in her poem “The Beau Ideal.”

Siegfried Sassoon, Mad Jack as he was affectionately known by his comrades, came from a privileged background and was educated at Cambridge. He left before graduating to pursue his literary interests after discovering a love for Romantic poets like Tennyson and Yeats. Leaving the upper-middle...