SOURCE: "Coming of Age in the Trenches: Siegfried Sassoon," in his An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Wayne State University Press, 1972, pp. 86-120.

Lane is an American poet and professor of English literature. In the following analysis, he upholds the validity of much of Sassoon's war poetry, citing the poet's "deceptively simple immediacy" and his direct, nonmetaphoric use of imagery.

[Sassoon's] prewar poetry, like the war poetry he wrote before his experience in the trenches, gives no indication of the corrosive vitality which was to characterize his poetry of the years 1916 to 1918—a vitality as much of the man as of the poet, and which occasioned a remarkable letter from a younger poet whom Sassoon met in Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917:

Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as...