author
Charles Hamilton Sorley
1895–1915
A gifted young poet of the First World War, he wrote with unusual clarity and honesty before being killed in action at just twenty. His poems are brief, direct, and still striking for how little they romanticize war.
1 Audiobook
Marlborough, and Other Poems
by Charles Hamilton Sorley
About the author
Born in Aberdeen in 1895 and raised partly in Cambridge, Charles Hamilton Sorley was an academically gifted student who attended Marlborough College and spent time studying in Germany before the First World War. That experience gave him a wider view of Europe than many of his contemporaries, and it helped shape the independence of mind that runs through his writing.
When war began, he returned to Britain, took a commission in the Suffolk Regiment, and served on the Western Front. He was killed in action at the Battle of Loos on 13 October 1915, only a few months after arriving in France.
Although his life was very short, Sorley became one of the most admired war poets of his generation. Readers still value his work for its intelligence, restraint, and refusal to turn battle into easy heroics; poems such as When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead show a voice that was already mature, skeptical, and memorable.