[Murry was a renowned English literary critic whose books include The Problem of Style (1922) and Keats and Shakespeare (1925). In the the following analysis, originally written in July, 1918, Murry asserts that Sassoon's work in Counter-Attack and Other Poems is "not poetry. " He faults the war verse in the volume because it fails to provide a contrast to the chaotic atmosphere of battle and because it has a distinctly prose-like quality.]

It is the fact, not the poetry, of Mr. Sassoon that is important. When a man is in torment and cries aloud, his cry is incoherent. It has neither weight nor meaning of its own. It is inhuman, and its very inhumanity strikes to the nerve of our hearts. We long to silence the cry, whether by succour and sympathy, or by hiding ourselves from it. That it should somehow stop or be stopped, and by ceasing trouble our hearts no more, is our chief desire; for it is ugly and painful, and it rasps at the cords of nature.

Mr. Sassoon's verses [in Counter-Attack and Other Poems]—they are not poetry—are such a cry. They touch not our imagination, but our sense. Reading them, we feel, not as we do with true art, which is the evidence of a man's triumph over his experience, that something has after all been saved from disaster, but that everything is irremediably and intolerably wrong. And, God knows, something is wrong-—wrong with Mr. Sassoon, wrong with the world which has made him the instrument of a discord so jangling. Why should one of the finest creatures of the earth be made to suffer a pain so brutal that he can give it no expression, that even this most human and mighty relief is denied him?

For these verses express nothing, save in so far as a cry expresses pain. Their effect is exhausted when the immediate impression dies away. Some of them are, by intention, realistic pictures of battle experience, and indeed one does not doubt their truth. The language is overwrought, dense and turgid, as a man's mind must be under the stress and obsession of a chaos beyond all comprehension.

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs,

High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps;
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime
And then the rain began—the jolly old rain!

That is horrible, but it does not produce the impression of horror. It numbs, not terrifies, the mind. Each separate reality and succeeding vision is, as it were, driven upon us by a hammer, but one hammer-beat is like another. Each adds to the sum more numbness and more pain, but the separateness and particularity of each is lost.

We are given the blurred confusion, and just because this is the truth of the matter exactly rendered we cannot apprehend it any more than the soldier who endures it can. We, like him, are 'crumpled and spun sideways.'

There is a value in this direct transcription of plain, unvarnished fact; but there is another truth more valuable still. One may convey the chaos of immediate sensation by a chaotic expression, as does Mr. Sassoon. But the unforgettable horror of an inhuman experience can only be rightly rendered by rendering also its relation to the harmony and calm of the soul which it shatters. In this context alone can it appear with that sudden shock to the imagination which is overwhelming. The faintest discord in a harmony has within it an infinity of disaster, which no confusion of notes, however wild and various and loud, can possibly suggest. It is on this that the wise saying that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity is so firmly based, for the quality of an experience can only be given by reference to the ideal condition of the human consciousness which it disturbs with pleasure or with pain. But in Mr. Sassoon's verses it is we who are left to create for ourselves the harmony of which he gives us only the moment of its annihilation. It is we who must be the poets and the artists if anything enduring is to be made of his work. He gives us only the data. There is, indeed, little enough harm in this; it is good that we should have the data; it is good that Mr. Sassoon should have written his book, and that the world should read it. But our concern here is with Mr. Sassoon the potential poet.

There is a danger that work such as his may pass current as poetry. It has the element of poetical popularity, for it produces an immediate impression. And since Mr. Sassoon is a young man, he may be hypnotized by popularity into believing that his work is done, and may end by wrecking the real poetic gift which at rare intervals peeps out in a line.

The last five words are beautiful because they do convey horror to the imagination, and do not bludgeon the senses. They convey horror to the imagination precisely because they contain, as it were, a full octave of emotional experience, and the compass ranges from serenity to desolation, not merely of the earth, but of the mind. The horror is in relation; it is placed, and therefore created. But in the following lines there is no trace of creation or significance:

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
And then, of course, they started with five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate and never a dud.

We choose these lines because they make a tolerable, if not a very distinguished, prose. Those that follow them in the piece which gives the book its name are more violent journalism. But why should such middling prose be ironed out into nominal blank verse lines, unless Mr. Sassoon imagined that he was, in fact, writing poetry? What he was doing was to make a barely sufficient entry in a logbook. If the lines of the whole piece were transposed into the prose form for which they clamour, they would then, surely, appear to be the rough notes (perhaps for a novel, much less probably for a poem) which they are.

Mr. Sassoon is evidently in some sense aware that an element of creation, or of art, is lacking in his work. Perhaps, on reading some of his own lines, he may have felt that they were not, after all, a new kind of poetry; and he may have been sensible of some inexplicable difference between his own verses and those of Mr. Thomas Hardy, which are a new kind of poetry. For we think we can detect a certain straining after pregnant compression, due to the attempt to catch Mr. Hardy's method. The overloading of epithet and verb in such a line as—

He winked his prying torch with patching glare

imitates the technical accidents of a poetical method, of which the real strength and newness consists exactly in the element which as yet has found only an insignificant place in Mr. Sassoon's mental composition. Against the permanence of the philosophic background in Mr. Hardy's work, each delicate shade of direct emotion is conveyed with all the force that comes of complete differentiation. With Mr. Sassoon there is no background, no differentiation; he has no calm, therefore he conveys no terror; he has no harmony, therefore he cannot pierce us with the anguish of discord.

The one artistic method which he employs is the irony of epigram. On these occasions alone does he appeal to a time beyond the immediate present of sensation. There is an effort at comparison and relation, or, in other words, an effort to grapple with his own experience and comprehend it. It is true that the effort and the comprehension do not go very far, and they achieve rather a device of technique than a method of real expression; but the device is effective enough.

The comprehension is superficial, however. The experiences of battle, awful, inhuman, and intolerable as they are, can be comprehended only by the mind which is capable of bringing their horror and their inhumanity home to the imagination of others. Without the perspective that comes from intellectual remoteness there can be no comprehension, no order and no art. Intellectual remoteness is not cold or callous; it is the condition in which a mind works as a mind, and a man is fully active as a man. Because this is wanting in Mr. Sassoon we are a prey to uneasiness when confronted with his work. We have a feeling of guilt, as though we were prying into secrets which were better hid. We have read, for instance, in the pages of M. Duhamel, far more terrible things than any Mr. Sassoon has to tell, but they were made terrible by the calm of the recording mind. Mr. Sassoon's mind is a chaos. It is as though he had no memory, and the thing itself returned as it was. That is why the fact, or the spectacle, of Mr. Sassoon is so much more impressive than his verses. That one who asked for perfect happiness so little of life as the writer of 'Break of Day'—

should be reduced to a condition in which he cannot surmount the disaster of his own experience—

Thud, thud, thud—quite soft … they never cease
Those whispering guns—O Christ! I want to go out
And screech at them to stop—I'm going crazy,
I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

—that is awful and inhuman and intolerable. And to that it makes no difference that it is Mr. Sassoon who is the martyr, and we ourselves who are the poets.