Siegfried Sassoon's poetry was published over a period of more than sixty years, almost to the moment of his death in 1967, a few days before his eighty-first birthday. In the history of British poetry, he will be remembered primarily for some one hundred poems--many satirical and almost all short--in which he protested the continuation of World War I through 1917 and 1918. Many of his war poems reflect with absolute authenticity the sufferings of the soldiers in the French trenches, in hospitals, or in their homeland after many of them returned disabled or traumatized. The poetry Sassoon wrote in the last half of his life drew less attention than his war poems and is, on the whole, far less arresting and original. For the most part, these later poems are meditative, reflecting his search for identity, and are important for their psychological revelations. His lyrics became increasingly religious in nature...