SOURCE: "Harmony Unheard: The Poetry of Siegfried Sassoon," in Renascence, Vol. XI, No. 3, Spring, 1959, pp. 115-24.

In the following essay, Maguire provides an overview of Sassoon's poetry, discussing major themes such as his musings on life and death, the absurdity of war, and the passage of time.

John Middleton Murry, writing in 1918 with the stern authority only the very young critic can achieve, decided that Siegfried Sassoon's Counter Attack, then enjoying best seller status, was "not poetry." Art, said Murry, is the evidence of man's triumph over his experience. It reminds us that something has, after all, been saved from disaster. Sassoon's verse gave the opposite impression: that everything is irremediably and intolerably wrong. Not only was the language overwrought, dense and turgid, but the verse failed to express the relation of war's horror to "the harmony and calm of the soul which it shatters." "Discord in harmony...