Abstract

The archetypal English trench poet, Siegfried Sassoon, employed the ironic techniques of satire and sarcasm to address the First World War’s absurdities. Yet, though his intentions are laudable, Sassoon’s methodologies are not ethical. Habermas’s conception of discourse ethics demands that readers be included in the construction of literary meaning; when ironies divide readers and writers, they miss their target. Despite readers’ sympathy for the war poet’s tragic position, poems such as “They,” “The Hero,” and “Blighters” present coercive rather than progressive rhetoric—negating the social good Sassoon intends by mimicking the unilateral bombasts of war.