Charles Sorley

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Charles Hamilton Sorley

Charles Hamilton Sorley (born May 19, 1895 in Aberdeen , † October 13, 1915 at Hulluch ) only came to an importance as a war poet posthumously.

Life

Sorley was born to Scottish parents in Aberdeen. In 1900 the family moved to Cambridge in England after the father (William Ritchie Sorley) had received a call to the chair of philosophy there. From 1908 to 1913 Sorley attended Marlborough College, where he received a scholarship to University College at the University of Oxford in late 1913, starting in the fall of 1914. Sorley wanted to use the months remaining until then for a stay in Germany. In Schwerin he held from January 1914 with a host family to improve his school German. At the beginning of May 1914 he then enrolled as a student at the University of Jena . In anticipation of the imminent war, Sorley set off from Jena for England at the end of the summer semester of 1914, but on a detour via a hiking tour from Koblenz up the Moselle. On August 1st, in Neumagen, he received news of the outbreak of the First World War . In Trier he was interned for one night before he was able to make his way to England via Belgium as an enemy foreigner.

Back in England, Sorley volunteered for the Suffolk Regiment . After months of officer training in England, he and his unit were sent to the front in northern France at the end of May 1915. With the rank of 'Captain' (captain) , he fell through a sniper's bullet in the trench near Hulluch near Loos . Sorley has no known grave, so his name is recorded on the Loos Memorial in Dud Corner Cemetery .

plant

Sorley wrote a total of 45 poems in his short life, many of them as a student at Marlborough College. He was best known for his war poems, which got by without the patriotic pathos that was still widespread at the beginning of the First World War and thus exerted a considerable influence on the later war poetry. A quick reception of Sorley in Great Britain stood in the way of his pro-Germany attitude until after the Second World War, which is most clearly reflected in his poem "To Germany" . Since 1985, however, his name can be found in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London.

In the same year a comprehensive biography of Jean Moorcroft Wilson was published, as well as a new edition of his poems , first published in 1916 under the title Marlborough and other Poems . In 1990, Wilson annotated the new edition of 130 letters, first published in 1919, with which Sorley reported back home his experiences and insights in Wilhelmine pre-war Germany and during military service. Among them are remarkable statements by a poet who matured early and an independent spirit about the nonsense of war and his rationally thought-out decision to go to war despite great sympathy for Germany.

Sorley understood his poem When you see millions of the mouthless dead as the counterpart and as a sober alternative to the patriotic war poem The Soldier , written by Rupert Brooke a short time earlier . It was his last poem. It was found in his equipment after death.

In 2016, the play "It is easy to be dead", written by the playwright Ian McPherson, was performed on two London stages. The title uses a line from Sorley's last poem. The play is based on the life and thoughts of Sorley based on his letters and poems.

literature

  • Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley: a biography , Cecil Woolf Publishers, London 1985
  • The collected poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley, Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Eds.), Cecil Woolf Publishers, London 1985
  • The collected letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley, Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Eds.), Cecil Woolf Publishers, London 1990
  • Brett Rutherford (Ed.): Death and The Downs: The Poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley, Yogh & Thorn Books, Providence, Rhode Island, 2010 (2nd amended edition 2017)
  • Neil McPherson: It Is Easy To Be Dead (a partly-fictionalized biographical play). Oberon Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-78682-009-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ [1] Casualty details: Sorley, Charles Hamilton. Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Visible online.
  2. ^ [2] Website: Poets of the Great War. Entry Charles Sorley.

Web links

Commons : Charles Sorley  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Charles Sorley  - Sources and full texts (English)
personal data
SURNAME Sorley, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sorley, Charles Hamilton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Aberdeen
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1915
Place of death Hulluch