작품 상세

SASSOON, SIEGFRIED. (1886-1967). English poet whose verses memorialized the horrors of World War One. ALS. (“Siegfried Sassoon”). 1p. 8vo. New York, June 18, (1920). To Will [Wally] Weber. “I have so many letters to answer that I’ve left yours too long, I fear. Thank you for what you say about my work. The poem you want is called Vision, & appears in Picture-Show, my last book. I was hoping to give another reading – at the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, but it has been cancelled, (though it may take place in July.). With good wishes, & thanking you again or your appreciation...” Born into an Jewish-Iraqi merchant family, Sassoon began writing verse after leaving Cambridge without a degree. However, it was for his poetry inspired by his experiences in the trenches of World War I that he became known. During his time on the Western Front, where he served with fellow World War I poets Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke, Sassoon exhibited a suicidal bravery that led to his receiving the Military Cross. “Sassoon found his poetic voice on the Somme, which forced him from clichés and posturing and taught him to be natural and idiomatic. His best poems, fueled by passion, bitterness and rage, appeared in Counter-Attack (1918),” (“Torture of a soul scarified forever,” Times Higher Education). “In June 1917, horrified by a million casualties on the Somme, by ‘all the darkness and the dreadful daylight’, he decided to protest against a war that was ‘deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,’ and published his 1917 anti-war statement “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration,” which was widely discussed in the press and Parliament, (ibid.). A court martial was discussed but he was, instead, hospitalized at Craiglockhart War Hospital where he was treated for shell shock and met fellow poet Wilfred Owen on whom he had a profound influence and who, with Sassoon’s assistance, would eclipse his fame. In January 1920, Sassoon traveled to New York to embark on an American lecture tour, during which, among other things, he met Lebanese-American artist, poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran. Billed as “England’s Soldier-Poet,” he read from his 1920 collection of poetry Picture Show which included the short poem, “Vision:” “I love all things that pass: their briefness is / Music that fades on transient silences. / Winds, birds, and glittering leaves that flare and fall— / They fling delight across the world; they call / To rhythmic-flashing limbs that rove and race... / A moment in the dawn for Youth’s lit face; / A moment's passion, closing on the cry— / 'O Beauty, born of lovely things that die!.’” Written from Westover Court, advertised in the June 15, 1922 The New York Herald as “bachelor apartments,” on a lightly browned sheet of paper. Folded and lightly creased with some chipping along the top and left edge. With the original envelope.