Counter-Attack and Other Poems

Siegfried Sassoon was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I. His first success was The Daffodil Murderer, a parody of The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield, published in 1913. Sassoon joined the military in 1914, but a badly broken arm kept him in England. At about this time his brother Hamo was killed in action. His strong poetry conveys the ugly truth of the soldiers in the trenches. He believed in the philosophy of "No truth unfitting" as seen in his images of rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide.