Siegfried Sassoon

There is a real sense of urgency and terror, in this poem. Groping along the tunnel, step by step…/ and sniffed the unwholesome air. The images and words that he uses makes you feel as if you are the solider in that tunnel, he allows us to see everything in the tunnel with extreme detail, he even explains how the air feels. Sassoon starts this poem with the verb "groping," he does this to reveal the extreme struggle that soldiers are oppressed with in war. The soldier 's senses are contained; he is carefully walking through a tunnel, pressing his body onto the walls, because he cannot see, it is pitch black and he only had a torch that flickered on and off. The torch acts like an eye; it winks, and glares. The soldier tries to see as best as he can, while smelling the unwholesome (unhealthy or harmful) air, which is most likely some kind of gas attack or the smell of dead bodies decomposing. He uses words like “Terribly glaring up”, to express how terrified this soldier was when he was walking along the tunnel. The tone in this poem seems to be anxious, because the…

Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were both soldier as they wrote their poems during the latter half of the war. Written between 1916 and 1918, Sassoon wrote They, to contrast the civilians’ nationalism with the realities of the war. While the Bishop in the poem believe “[the soldiers] will not be the same; for they’ll have fought / in a just cause…” the soldiers turn that statement of nationalism into a statement of horror as they describe the deaths of their fellow comrades . In the…

the poetry of the twentieth century. This transformation is evident from the works of popular war poets, like Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, among others, that the self-satisfied poetry of the recent past needed to be broken and they could not simply write poetry celebrating nature. War poetry captures the physical and emotional, brutal reality of the war, the pain, madness, and degradation of human kind. The finest and the most discussed wars poets like Owen, Thomas, Rosenberg,…

questioning why you are there fighting a war can be difficult because you do not want your loyalty to be seen as wavering. However, at some point enough can be enough. For Siegfried Sassoon he was able to muster the courage to voice his opinion on the war he was fighting in. The direct audience for his letter was Sassoon’s commanding officer. The letter was published in the Bradford Pioneer as well, so the larger audience would have been the citizens who read the paper. For Sassoon, his purpose…

James Walker September 3, 2015 Poems 1102 Sassoon and Owen World War 1 was one of the most memorable wars in history; it was nothing like people had ever seen before. The violence, the tragedies of so many, and life at home versus life at war were only truly known and impacted those who survived. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are survivors of WWI, who authors of poems that describe the feeling of being a solider and the misinterpretation of those who were not soldiers. Siegfried Sassoon…

The Fields of Agony: British Poetry of the First World War states, “Patients suffering from what was termed shell shock or neurasthenia were encouraged to talk and write about the horrific experiences that had caused their conditions; many less celebrated writers discovered the cure for themselves, and found eager readers” (Sillars 11). The poem “Disabled” by Wilfred Owen, and the poems “They” and “Glory of Women” by Siegfried Sassoon, explore the negative effects the Great War had on soldiers,…

“Attack”, by Siegfried Sassoon, effectively represents a vivid and graphic view of the apathy of war by divulging into the minds of the soldiers, giving a more personal view to his poem. There are many such instances in which Sassoon’s clever diction. Instead of the norm of authors of his time, Sassoon did not emphasize the dramatics of war during the battle; he accentuated the pre-war stage. Firstly, Sassoon divulges into the fears of the soldiers. He does this by construing a grave scene.…

There were a total of 38 million men fighting in WWI, these men were Russian, German, French, Italian, English, American, Hungarian, Austrian, Bulgarian or from the Ottoman Empire. They all had the same experiences while at war. There were differences depending where they were placed, but the fundamental characteristics were the same. There were a total of 17 million dead and 20 million wounded; the survivors were left to live with the effects of being dehumanized because of all the death they…

A Soldiers Sacrifice in “They” and “Disabled” In Siegfried Sassoon’s “They” and Wilfred Owens “Disabled”, both poems describe the physical and emotional trauma that soldiers experienced in the trenches and on the battlefield. Those left on the home front did not understand the circumstances that the soldiers were under and were shocked when their boys came home suffering from “shell shock” and PTSD. “Social reactions to shell shock victims varied from sympathy or anger at the war to confusion…

poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen became leading poets of the First World War. During their time in the service both were diagnosed with shell shock and were hospitalized near Edinburgh, where both became friends. According to Thomas W. Salmon, M.D. (1917), “ It is certain that in the early months of the present war many soldiers suffering from war neuroses were regarded as insane and disposed of accordingly” (p. 14). Some of their work focuses on describing the horrors they encountered…