Siegfried Sassoon was a British poet and novelist who is best known today for his angry, satirical, and compassionate poems concerning the horrors of World War I. "Suicide In The Trenches," published in 1918 in a collection of poems called Counter-Attack and Other Poems, starkly contrasts with romanticized poetic views of war, for example those penned by Sassoon's contemporaries Rupert Brooke and Jessie Pope.
In the poem, a young naive soldier arrives at the front filled with hope and optimism. The brutal realities of the war change him, and, unable to cope with the things he has seen, he commits suicide in the trenches.
All of the poems in the anthology draw from Sassoon's own experiences fighting in the trenches during World War I. Their sharp realism gave the public a gritty and harrowing view of what the war had really been like for the men at the front. "Suicide in the Trenches" is openly critical of the British public who were enthusiastic about the war and who encouraged young men who were barely more than boys to give up their lives, without fully understanding or educating themselves about what is waiting for them on the front lines.
