The War Poems

沒有一種詩比出自一次世界大戰的士兵所寫的詩更觸動人心的了。《The Great War Poets》系列這次重新編排了四個世界大戰時英勇參戰的戰地詩人，其中包含了Siegfried Sassoon、Wilfred Owen、Robert Graves、Edward Thomas、Rupert Brooke和David Jones。(見下方連結)

'In later years', Sir Rupert Hart-Davis writes in his Introduction, 'when Siegfried Sassoon had written much else in prose and verse, he was annoyed at always being referred to simply as a war poet, but it was the Great War that turned him into a poet of international fame, and I feel sure that his ghost will forgive me for thus bringing together these magnificently scarifying poems'.

Sir Rupert has arranged the poems as far as possible in the order of their composition, and the reader can compare them with the poet's movements by means of the Biographical Table which is included. Fourteen of the poems in this volume are published for the first time.


【相關閱讀】
>> 《Wilfred Owen》
>> 《Rupert Brooke》
>> 《Rupert Graves》
>> 《David Jones》
>> 《Edward Thomass》

 

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 and educated at Clare College, Cambridge. He served in the trenches during the First World War, where he began to write the poems for which he is remembered. Despatched as 'shell-shocked' to hospital, he organised public protest against the war. His poetry initially met with little response, but his reputation grew steadily in the following decades. Apart from the War Poems of 1919, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. But it is as a novelist and autobiographer that he is perhaps better known. Sassoon's semi-autobiographical trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936), was outstandingly successful. He published several more volumes of autobiography, including Siegfried's Journey (1945), before his death in 1967.