Rhymed Ruminations(1940)

Though moved to contribute to the war effort with his patriotic verse, Sassoon continued with the work of autognosis and the poetry of his private self throughout the war. Amidst the anxieties and distractions of wartime, much of his autognostic creative energy was directed to the composition of his prose memoirs, and since before the war began, he had been beset with nagging doubts about his poetic ability. By 1939 he had come to consider his poems in which he sought to express his true or inner self as ‘essentially private communications’. Choosing and arranging poems for Rhymed Ruminations, his only volume of new verse published during the war, he worried about the discrepancy between his autognostic approach and contemporary modernist tastes. In the war years he endured long spells of poetic inactivity, though he was by no means completely silent, writing more poetry than has been generally realized, most of it unpublished. The manuscripts containing this work – about forty poems – are marked by signs of his crisis of confidence; many lines are crossed out, there are scribbled amendments and convoluted additions, leaving the impression that he lacked the creative energy to complete this work or the confidence to see it published. When he considered a second wartime volume in 1944, he imagined a collection of only sixteen poems, a number soon reduced to twelve, and even then he doubted their cohesiveness as a sequence. And yet, in spite of all this doubt, he continued to write poetry.