Charles hamilton sorley biography of michael

  • Sorley was the Scots-born son of a philosophy don, and was privately-educated at schools in Cambridge and Marlborough.
  • "Sorley, Charles Hamilton (1895–1915), poet" published on by Oxford University Press.
  • He was a boy so rich, so extraordinarily lovable and so intensely alive that he seems to those of us who did not know him too good to be true.

    • •

    Community

    Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915) was born in Aberdeen on 19 May 1895.  An exceptionally intelligent child, his father, William Ritchie Sorley, was a professor at the University of Aberdeen.

    Living in Cambridge from 1900 onwards, Sorley was educated at first Marlborough College from 1908-13, where he excelled at debating, to be followed by University College, Oxford after he won a scholarship.

    Before starting his studies at Oxford however, Sorley decided to spend a year in Germany, in 1913, first in Mecklenburg and afterwards at the University of Jena.

    It was during this time that war was declared.  Sorley was initially interned at Trier but released after one night, with instructions to leave the country.

    Sorley, impatient to sign up, returned home and enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment in 1914 as a 2nd Lieutenant, arriving in France on 30 May 1915 as a full Lieutenant, where he served near Ploegsteert.  He wa

    •

    NEW SECOND EDITION AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER AND PAPERBACK

    DEATH AND THE DOWNS: THE POETRY OF CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY. Revised second edition, 2017, edited and annotated bygd Brett Rutherford. Robert Graves called Sorley one of the three best poets killed in World War I. Shot by a German sniper in the Battle of Loos, Charles Sorley died at age 20, leaving behind enough poems for a slender volume published by his father in 1915: Marlborough and Other Poems. Several of Sorley's poems have been featured in countless war anthologies, but the poet's complete work was kept in print only until 1932. There was a reprint sometime in the 1970s and then Sorley seems to have been forgotten again.


    Sorley's naturlig eller utan tillsats poems, inspired by English naturalist Richard Jefferies (the British Thoreau), depict the haunted landscape of the Wiltshire Downs, from the days of Roman-occupied Britain to Sorley's own time. As a student at Cambridge, ung Sorley was steeped in the classics; he then trave

    •

    One of the earliest and most significant losses amongst the ranks of the Great War soldier-poets, Charles Hamilton Sorley is nowadays known for only a small number of his published poems. 

    This is unsurprising, given his short life and brief period of active service, with just over four months in France. But what poems those few are: polished, powerful and moving. Although conventional in their focus, technique and structure, they are also often striking in their quality of thinking, feeling, tone and literary skill. 

    The best-known, and arguably the finest, of these (two kinds of list that do not necessarily always align well) include: ‘To Germany’, ‘Barbury Camp’, ‘All the Hills and Vales Along’, and ‘Such, Such is Death’. For many, though, the pinnacle of achievement in Sorley’s war poems is the sonnet ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead’ – as distinctive and memorable a piece of soldierly reflection and regretful anger as anything from Owen or Sassoon. 

    Sorley was th

  • charles hamilton sorley biography of michael