Understandable perhaps from the point of view of the poet: readers on the other hand might wish to demur. The poems gathered here and chronologically ordered, thereby tracing the course of the war, are an extraordinary testimony to the almost unimaginable experiences of a combatant in that bitter conflict. Moving from the patriotic optimism of the first few poems (" ... fighting for our freedom, we are free") to the anguish and anger of the later work (where "hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists / Flounders in mud ... "), there comes a point when the reality of trench-warfare and its aftershocks move beyond comprehension: Sassoon knows this, and it becomes a powerful element in his art. As a book, the images have a cumulative relentlessness that make it almost impossible to read more than a few poems in one sitting. Unlike the avant-garde experiments developing in Europe in the first decades of this century, Sassoon's verse is formally conservative--but this was perhaps necessary, for as one reads the poems, one feels that the form, the classically inflected tropes, the metre and rhyme, apart from ironising the rhetoric of glory and battle were necessary techniques for containing the emotion (and indeed, a tone of barely controlled irony may have been the only means by which these angry observations would have been considered publishable at the time). When Sassoon's line begins to fragment, as it does in several of the later poems, it is under the extreme pressure to express the inexpressible. Compassion and sympathy are omnipresent here, in their full etymological sense of suffering with or alongside others--something the higher echelons of command (those " ... old men who died / Slow, natural deaths--old men with ugly souls") were never able or willing to contemplate. But Sassoon intuited the future of warfare, could sense that this was not "the war to end all wars": the mock-religious invocation of the final poem prefigures the vicious euphemisms of more recent conflicts: "Grant us the power to prove, by poison gases, / The needlessness of shedding human blood." Sassoon's bile-black irony signals a deep-felt pessimism: it was with good reason. --Burhan Tufail

    Enjoy this classic Rudyard Kipling poem today!

    The must-read poem "If We Must Die" by Claude McKay, which begins with the famous line "If we must die—let it not be like hogs"

    Contents: Gerontion; Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar; Sweeney Erect; A Cooking Egg; Le Directeur; Melange adultere de tout; Lune de Miel; The Hippopotamus; Dans le Restaurant; Whispers of Immortality; Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service; Sweeney Among the Nightingales; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; Portrait of a Lady; Preludes; Rhapsody on a Windy Night; Morning at the Window; The Boston Evening Transcript; Aunt Helen; Cousin Nancy; Mr. Apollinax; Hysteria; Conversation Galante; La Figlia Che Pianga.

    Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874-1925) was an American poet who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

    Powys Mathers during and shortly after the First World War rank with those of Arthur Waley or Ezra Pound. This volume, pairing his first two books, Coloured Stars and Black Marigolds, assembles the best of his remarkable poetry, which even now reads with undated freshness. Tony Harrison, a long-time Mathers admirer, describes the puzzles of Mathers' life and the fascination and originality of his poetry in his entertaining preface. E. Powys Mathers (1892-1939) is most often remembered, other than as the author of Black Marigolds, for his version of the Thousand Nights and One Night and as his alter ego, Torquemada of the Observer - a name to conjure with in the history of the cryptic crossword.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    Modern American Poetry contains over 130 poems from American masters such as Ezra Pound, Sara Teasdale, Stephen Vincent Benét, Emily Dickinson, and many others.