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Sorley, Charles Hamilton (1895–1915), poet, was born in Aberdeen on 19 May 1895, the elder twin son and third surviving child in the family of two sons and two daughters of William Ritchie Sorley (1855–1935), professor of moral philosophy at Aberdeen University, and his wife, Janetta Colquhoun Smith. When Sorley was five his father was appointed Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University and elected a fellow of King's College, and from then on Sorley was brought up in Cambridge, where until he was nine he was taught at home by his mother. From 1906 to 1908, with his twin brother Kenneth, Sorley attended King's College choir school as a day boy, and it was there, at the age of ten, that he wrote a publishable poem, ‘The Tempest’, in form and content a clear portent of his adult work. Compulsory regular attendance at services in King's College chapel may account for numerous biblical references in later poems; Sorley was deeply religious in the philosophical sense but always remained out of tune with conventional belief. When he was thirteen, despite an erratic academic performance at King's, Sorley gained an open scholarship to Marlborough College, where he developed two abiding sensual passions, for food and cross-country running. His poetry began to appear in The Marlburian in 1912, influenced by John Masefield and by the Wiltshire downs, with their irresistible evocation of the past. Impending death was an early subject, and one of his most accomplished schoolboy poems is ‘The River’, based on an actual suicide.

In his last year at Marlborough, Sorley won the senior Farrar prize for English literature and language, the Buchanan prize for public reading, and a scholarship to University College, Oxford. It was decided that before going up to Oxford, which in fact he never did, he should spend time with a German family in Mecklenburg and three months studying at the university in Jena, where he attended lectures on philosophy and political economy and made many close friends among German Jews. Hence his stay on the continent strongly influenced the ambivalent feelings he was to entertain towards the war, reflected so strikingly in his poetry. He had rashly embarked on a walking tour in the Moselle region when war was declared, and he spent the night of 2 August 1914 in prison at Trier. Although Sorley was to make light of the experience, he had been in considerable danger. On his release he made his way back to England through Belgium, sailing from Antwerp in the hastily requisitioned Montrose.

Sorley was deeply divided in his loyalties, but, believing the war to be an evil necessity, he immediately enlisted and received a commission in the 7th battalion of the Suffolk regiment. He was promoted first lieutenant in November 1914 and captain nine months later. He arrived in France with his battalion on 30 May 1915, having told his mother, ‘I do wish people would not deceive themselves by talk of a just war. There is no such thing as a just war. What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.’ He served for several months in the trenches around Ploegsteert, and displayed considerable courage in saving the lives of two men. When his battalion moved south to take part in the battle of Loos, Sorley commanded an attack on two trenches known as the Hairpin, south of the Hohenzollern redoubt, and was killed by a sniper on 13 October 1915. He was buried near the spot where he fell. He was twenty.

A posthumous collection, Marlborough and other Poems, was published in 1916 and went into six editions in the first year. Robert Graves pronounced Charles Sorley ‘one of the three poets of importance killed during the war’, rating him alongside Wilfred Owen. Sorley is certainly remarkable for rejecting the prevailing enthusiasm for war so early on, and for forecasting, through a mixture of irony and pity, the horrors of Flanders before ever he reached the front. Typical of his best work, much of which he had no opportunity to revise, are ‘Barbury Camp’, written at Marlborough, ‘The Song of the Ungirt Runners’, and his last poem, ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’, scribbled in pencil and discovered in his kitbag after he had been killed. His parents published a collection of his letters in 1919, The Letters of Charles Sorley, which the Manchester Guardian thought ‘contained the first mature impressions of a nature which was all vigour and radiance, a boy who may be said to have had a genius for truth’. His collected poems appeared in 1985.
--Michael De-la-Noy, rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography