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On September 1, 1967, Siegfried Sassoon, English poet and writer, died at the age of 80. From the article:
"Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about World War I, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. He was also well known as a novelist and political commentator. In 1957 he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family, sometimes called the “Rothschilds of the East” because the family fortune was made in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country gentleman before the World War I, pursuing his two major interests, poetry and fox hunting. His early work, which was privately printed in several slim volumes between 1906 and 1916, is considered minor and imitative, heavily influenced by John Masefield (of whose work The Daffodil Murderer is a parody).
Following the outbreak of the World War I, Sassoon served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, seeing action in France in late 1915. He received a Military Cross for bringing back a wounded soldier during heavy fire. After being wounded in action, Sassoon wrote an open letter of protest to the war department, refusing to fight any more. “I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,” he wrote in the letter. At the urging of Bertrand Russell, the letter was read in the House of Commons. Sassoon expected to be court-martialed for his protest, but poet Robert Graves intervened on his behalf, arguing that Sassoon was suffering from shell-shock and needed medical treatment. In 1917, Sassoon was hospitalized.
Counter-Attack and Other Poems collects some of Sassoon’s best war poems, all of which are “harshly realistic laments or satires,” writes Margaret B. McDowell in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The later collection The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon included 64 poems of the war, most written while Sassoon was in hospital recovering from his injuries. Public reaction to Sassoon’s poetry was fierce. Some readers complained that the poet displayed little patriotism, while others found his shockingly realistic depiction of war to be too extreme. Even pacifist friends complained about the violence and graphic detail in his work. But the British public bought the books because, in his best poems, Sassoon captured the feeling of trench warfare and the weariness of British soldiers for a war that seemed never to end. “The dynamic quality of his war poems,” according to a critic for the Times Literary Supplement, “was due to the intensity of feeling which underlay their cynicism.” “In the history of British poetry,” McDowell wrote, “[Sassoon] will be remembered primarily for some one hundred poems … in which he protested the continuation of World War I.”
After the war, Sassoon became involved in Labour Party politics, lectured on pacifism, and continued to write. His most successful works of this period were his trilogy of autobiographical novels, The Memoirs of George Sherston. In these, he gave a thinly-fictionalized account, with little changed except names, of his wartime experiences, contrasting them with his nostalgic memories of country life before the war and recounting the growth of his pacifist feelings. Some have maintained that Sassoon’s best work is his prose, particularly the first two Sherston novels. Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man was described by a critic for the Springfield Republican as “a novel of wholly fresh and delightful content,” and Robert Littrell of Bookman called it “a singular and a strangely beautiful book.”
That book’s sequel was also well received. The New Statesman critic called Memoirs of an Infantry Officer “a document of intense and sensitive humanity.” In a review for the Times Literary Supplement, after Sassoon’s death, one critic wrote: “His one real masterpiece, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer … is consistently fresh. His self scrutiny is candid, critical, and humourous. … If Sassoon had written as well as this consistently, he would have been a figure of real stature. As it is, English literature has one great work from him almost by accident.”
Sassoon’s critical biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith found a similarly positive reception. In this volume, he recounted numerous anecdotes about Meredith, portraying him vividly as a person as well as an author: “The reader lays the book down with the feeling that a great author has become one of his close neighbors,” wrote G.F. Whicher in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. The critical portions of the book were also praised, though some found the writing careless. But the New Yorker critic noted Sassoon’s “fresh and lively literary criticism,” and the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement declared that “Mr. Sassoon gives us a poet’s estimate, considered with intensity of insight, skilfully shaped as biography, and written with certainty of style.”
In 1957 Sassoon became a convert to Catholicism, though for some time before his conversion, his spiritual concerns had been the predominant subject of his writing. These later religious poems are usually considered markedly inferior to those written between 1917 and 1920. Yet Sequences (published shortly before his conversion) has been praised by some critics. Derek Stanford, in Books and Bookmen, claimed that “the poems in Sequences constitute some of the most impressive religious poetry of this century.”
Speaking of Sassoon’s war poetry in a 1981 issue of the Spectator, P.J. Kavanagh claimed that “today they ring as true as they ever did; it is difficult to see how they could be better.” Looking back over Sassoon’s long literary career, Peter Levi wrote in Poetry Review: “One can experience in his poetry the slow, restless ripening of a very great talent; its magnitude has not yet been recognised. … He is one of the few poets of his generation we are really unable to do without.”
Sassoon died in 1967 from stomach cancer. His papers are held at University of Cambridge."
"Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about World War I, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. He was also well known as a novelist and political commentator. In 1957 he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family, sometimes called the “Rothschilds of the East” because the family fortune was made in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country gentleman before the World War I, pursuing his two major interests, poetry and fox hunting. His early work, which was privately printed in several slim volumes between 1906 and 1916, is considered minor and imitative, heavily influenced by John Masefield (of whose work The Daffodil Murderer is a parody).
Following the outbreak of the World War I, Sassoon served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, seeing action in France in late 1915. He received a Military Cross for bringing back a wounded soldier during heavy fire. After being wounded in action, Sassoon wrote an open letter of protest to the war department, refusing to fight any more. “I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,” he wrote in the letter. At the urging of Bertrand Russell, the letter was read in the House of Commons. Sassoon expected to be court-martialed for his protest, but poet Robert Graves intervened on his behalf, arguing that Sassoon was suffering from shell-shock and needed medical treatment. In 1917, Sassoon was hospitalized.
Counter-Attack and Other Poems collects some of Sassoon’s best war poems, all of which are “harshly realistic laments or satires,” writes Margaret B. McDowell in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The later collection The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon included 64 poems of the war, most written while Sassoon was in hospital recovering from his injuries. Public reaction to Sassoon’s poetry was fierce. Some readers complained that the poet displayed little patriotism, while others found his shockingly realistic depiction of war to be too extreme. Even pacifist friends complained about the violence and graphic detail in his work. But the British public bought the books because, in his best poems, Sassoon captured the feeling of trench warfare and the weariness of British soldiers for a war that seemed never to end. “The dynamic quality of his war poems,” according to a critic for the Times Literary Supplement, “was due to the intensity of feeling which underlay their cynicism.” “In the history of British poetry,” McDowell wrote, “[Sassoon] will be remembered primarily for some one hundred poems … in which he protested the continuation of World War I.”
After the war, Sassoon became involved in Labour Party politics, lectured on pacifism, and continued to write. His most successful works of this period were his trilogy of autobiographical novels, The Memoirs of George Sherston. In these, he gave a thinly-fictionalized account, with little changed except names, of his wartime experiences, contrasting them with his nostalgic memories of country life before the war and recounting the growth of his pacifist feelings. Some have maintained that Sassoon’s best work is his prose, particularly the first two Sherston novels. Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man was described by a critic for the Springfield Republican as “a novel of wholly fresh and delightful content,” and Robert Littrell of Bookman called it “a singular and a strangely beautiful book.”
That book’s sequel was also well received. The New Statesman critic called Memoirs of an Infantry Officer “a document of intense and sensitive humanity.” In a review for the Times Literary Supplement, after Sassoon’s death, one critic wrote: “His one real masterpiece, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer … is consistently fresh. His self scrutiny is candid, critical, and humourous. … If Sassoon had written as well as this consistently, he would have been a figure of real stature. As it is, English literature has one great work from him almost by accident.”
Sassoon’s critical biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith found a similarly positive reception. In this volume, he recounted numerous anecdotes about Meredith, portraying him vividly as a person as well as an author: “The reader lays the book down with the feeling that a great author has become one of his close neighbors,” wrote G.F. Whicher in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. The critical portions of the book were also praised, though some found the writing careless. But the New Yorker critic noted Sassoon’s “fresh and lively literary criticism,” and the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement declared that “Mr. Sassoon gives us a poet’s estimate, considered with intensity of insight, skilfully shaped as biography, and written with certainty of style.”
In 1957 Sassoon became a convert to Catholicism, though for some time before his conversion, his spiritual concerns had been the predominant subject of his writing. These later religious poems are usually considered markedly inferior to those written between 1917 and 1920. Yet Sequences (published shortly before his conversion) has been praised by some critics. Derek Stanford, in Books and Bookmen, claimed that “the poems in Sequences constitute some of the most impressive religious poetry of this century.”
Speaking of Sassoon’s war poetry in a 1981 issue of the Spectator, P.J. Kavanagh claimed that “today they ring as true as they ever did; it is difficult to see how they could be better.” Looking back over Sassoon’s long literary career, Peter Levi wrote in Poetry Review: “One can experience in his poetry the slow, restless ripening of a very great talent; its magnitude has not yet been recognised. … He is one of the few poets of his generation we are really unable to do without.”
Sassoon died in 1967 from stomach cancer. His papers are held at University of Cambridge."
Siegfried Sassoon | Poetry Foundation
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Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet's Life
Max Egremont tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the most famous famous young writers of the 1910's, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and an inspiration to...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on September 1, 1967 English poet and writer Siegfried Sassoon died at the age of 80.
Images:
1. Real hero Siegfried Sassoon - Conscience on and off the Battlefield
2. Siegfried Sassoon 'Man it seemed had been created to jab the life out of Germans'
3. Siegfried Sassoon and David Thomas
4. The Military Cross medal that Siegfried Sassoon 'threw into the Mersey in anti-war protest'
Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet's Life
Max Egremont tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the most famous famous young writers of the 1910's, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and an inspiration to Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence.
Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. As a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.
He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster while trying to grow as a poet in peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the aristocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into the group of "bright young things" who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate but fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism. From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont's definitive biography, which draws from unprecedented access to Sassoon's complete papers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qnw8SMRAiA
Biographies;
1. greatwarliterature.co.uk/siegfried-sassoon
2. warpoets.org/conflicts/great-war/siegfried-sassoon-1886-1967
1. Background from {[https://www.greatwarliterature.co.uk/siegfried-sassoon/]}
Born on 8th September 1886, Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was the second of three sons of Alfred and Theresa Sassoon. His parents separated when he was four years old, leaving his mother to raise her three sons alone. Nonetheless, Sassoon spent a happy and secure childhood and was educated at Marlborough before going on to Clare College, Cambridge, although he failed to obtain a degree. Back home in Kent, Sassoon lived the life of a country squire, as well as writing poetry, some of which was shown to the influential art collector, Edward Marsh, who quickly became friends with Sassoon, introducing him to several other literary celebrities, including Rupert Brooke.
Upon the outbreak of war, Sassoon immediately enlisted as a Trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, but a bad fall while riding left him with a broken arm. When he had recovered from this injury, Sassoon transferred to the infantry and was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers in May 1915, leaving for France that November, following training.
Sassoon’s war soon became personal. He received news of the death of his brother Hamo in Gallipoli in November 1915, then in March 1916, his close friend Second Lieutenant David Thomas was shot and killed. The tone of Sassoon’s poetry changed from this moment on, as did his attitude to the war: he wanted to avenge these deaths, regardless of his own personal safety and his exploits earned him the nickname “Mad Jack”, as well as a Military Cross.
In mid-1916, Sassoon was sent back to England, suffering from trench fever, and didn’t return to the trenches until February 1917, where he participated in the First Battle of the Scarpe and was wounded in the shoulder. By the end of April, Sassoon was back in England again.
While convalescing from his wound, Sassoon became more and more embittered about he war and also fell under the influence of a group of pacifists, including John Middleton Murry and Bertrand Russell. The culmination of these events was Sassoon’s now famous Declaration against the validity of the war. Once knowledge of his Declaration became public, his friends, especially Marsh and Graves, tried to convince him that his aim of being court-martialled would never be permitted. Sassoon therefore, reluctantly, agreed to attend a medical board and, following evidence from Robert Graves, was declared as suffering from shell-shock. On 23rd July, he was admitted to Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Edinburgh, where he came under the care of Dr. William H. R. Rivers.
While at Craiglockhart, Sassoon wrote some of his most affecting and effective poetry. He also met Wilfred Owen (a fellow patient) and the two quickly became friends. Sassoon’s influence over Owen’s poetry is obvious, but Owen also idolised the older poet and war hero.
Under the influence of Rivers’s treatment, Sassoon came to realise that he could no longer tolerate remaining safely in Scotland while his men were suffering in France. On 26th November, he was declared fit for active service and left for Palestine in mid-February 1918, only returning to France in May. On 13th July, Sassoon was in No Man’s Land when he stood up and removed his helmet, whereupon he was shot in the head. He later discovered that it was one of his own men who had delivered the blow, believing him to be an advancing German. The wound was not fatal, but resulted in the end of the Sassoon’s war and he was placed on indefinite sick leave, eventually being discharged from the army in March 1919, with the rank of Captain.
Sassoon waited for several months to hear from Owen and it was quite some while before he heard of the younger poet’s death on 4th November 1918. Immediately after the war, Sassoon threw himself into literary work, meeting Thomas Hardy and T. E. Lawrence, among others, and becoming literary editor of the Daily Herald, in which position he was able to advance the career of Edmund Blunden, who became a lifelong friend.
In 1928, Sassoon began writing his autobiographies, initially as fictionalised accounts and then in non-fiction versions, as well as continuing to write poetry. During the 1920’s, Sassoon’s homosexuality became a more important part of his life and he embarked upon a few romantic liaisons, most notably with Stephen Tennant. Eventually, however, Sassoon tired of the fickle nature of these relationships and he married Hester Gatty in December 1933. They lived at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire and had one son, named George, in 1936. The marriage did not last, however, and the couple separated in 1945. In 1957 Sassoon converted to the Roman Catholic faith and he died on September 1st 1967.
Siegfried Sassoon’s war poetry is often – and unjustly – eclipsed by that of Wilfred Owen and yet Sassoon’s poems contain a brutal honesty that is lacking from almost every other poet in this genre. This, mingled with his humorous, ironic and occasionally lyrical style allows us to see the effects of the war: the anger, the waste, the bitterness; but underneath all of that, we can see the unutterable sadness of the “world’s worst wound” as Sassoon called the conflict, and a love for his fellow sufferers that few would succeed in conveying so beautifully or so honestly."
2. Background from {[https://www.warpoets.org/conflicts/great-war/siegfried-sassoon-1886-1967/]}
The War Poets Association
Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967)
Siegfried Sassoon was the product of two very different cultures, his Jewish father’s family of merchant princes from Baghdad and his English mother’s Thornycroft farming ancestors, turned sculptors, painters and engineers. The second of three sons, he grew up in rural Kent, where his father abandoned the family before Siegfried was five, dying four years later. After a late entry into the school system Siegfried failed to complete his formal education at Cambridge, devoting himself instead over the next seven years to poetry, horses, cricket and golf. He was also coming to terms with his homosexuality, in an age which criminalized it.
When War was declared on 4 August 1914 Sassoon had already enlisted enthusiastically, first as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, later transferring to the Royal Welch Fusiliers in May 1915. The death of his younger brother in the Dardanelles in November 1915, his departure for the Western Front and his meeting with Robert Graves in France were significant factors in his changing attitude towards the War. Initially a fervent patriot writing in the vein of Rupert Brooke (see ‘Absolution’ and ‘To My Brother’), by the time his first collection of war poems, ‘The Old Huntsman, was published in May 1917 his tone had become predominantly angry, his style largely satiric, establishing him in poems like ‘Blighters’, ‘The One-Legged Man’ and ‘They’ as one of the most influential and historically important poets of the First World War.
Despite his courageous, at times almost foolhardy, acts in the face of danger, which won him a Military Cross and the nickname ‘Mad Jack’, Sassoon’s opposition to the War hardened even further as he witnessed first the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, then the Battle of Arras in April 1917. It was while convalescing from a wound received in the latter and in close contact with Lady Ottoline Morrell and her pacifist circle that he made his famous anti-war protest, which was read out in Parliament in late July 1917 and published in The Times the following day.
Committed to a shell-shock hospital, Craiglockhart, in an attempt to silence him, Sassoon was brought into contact with Wilfred Owen, whose poetry was deeply affected by the encounter. He also met there the eminent psychiatrist Dr Rivers, who persuaded him to return to the fighting. After a few months in Palestine with the 25th Royal Welch Fusiliers, Sassoon arrived back in France in April 1918. Promoted to the rank of Captain, he commanded his Company until July 1918, when he was wounded in the head while holding the trenches in front of St Venant.
Sassoon’s return to England coincided with the publication of his second collection of war poems, Counter-Attack, which contained many of his most effective satires on the war-mongers, including ‘Base Details’, ‘Does It Matter?’, ‘The Glory of Women’ and ‘The General’:
‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
* * *
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
In this poem the anger is focused on those most directly responsible for the soldiers’ fate. The germ of this brief but highly effective satire seems to have come from an incident in Sassoon’s journey to Arras, when his regiment, the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers, had passed their Corps Commander, Lt.-Gen. Maxse. In the poem the unsuspecting soldiers’ praise of their General’s bluff heartiness is contrasted starkly with the results of his incompetence, just as his speech is contrasted with the soldiers’ cheerful slang. The use of generic names – ‘Harry’ and ‘Jack’ – which both personalizes and depersonalizes them, and the General’s breezily repeated greeting, together with Harry’s ironic comment and the brutal ending, convey the situation far more vividly than a more discursive piece. The colloquial ‘did for them both’, which follows unexpectedly on what appears to be the concluding rhyming couplet, is all the more shocking for its euphemism. It is even more effective than Sassoon’s original ‘murdered them both’, to which several of his mentors had objected.
* * *
The War had really ended for Sassoon when he left France in July 1918, though technically he remained in the army on indefinite sick-leave until 11 March 1919, when the London Gazette announced his retirement. He later objected to being known mainly as a war-poet, but he was endlessly to recycle the material which had initially made his name. Less than a decade after the publication of Counter-Attack he would return to the War for a prose trilogy which was to consolidate his fame: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936). And when that was completed he returned to the same material for the third time in his three-volume autobiography, The Old Century (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried’s Journey (1945). Significantly, a fourth volume, not based on his War experiences, was left unfinished. As though caught in a time warp, Sassoon seems to have had a compulsive need to re-live that particular part of his life in his work.
It might be argued that the War both made and unmade Sassoon. As a young man determined to be a poet but with no clear sense of direction, it had given him a subject as well as the experience and passion to turn that subject into memorable verse. And as a mature writer who appeared again to have lost a sense of direction, the War provided the way forward in his fictional and autobiographical prose trilogies. When that material was finally exhausted, however, so too was Sassoon’s creative impulse. A failed marriage and increasing loneliness, exacerbated by the departure of his only child, George, for school and university, led him eventually to the Roman Catholic Church. There, in his last decade, he found a new subject for his poetry and a tranquil end to his turbulent life.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Bibliography: Works by Siegfried Sassoon (in order of publication)
The Daffodil Murderer (John Richmond, 1913)
The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (Heinemann, 1917)
Counter-Attack and Other Poems (Heinemann, 1918)
Picture Show (Privately printed, 1919)
War Poems (Heinemann, 1919)
Recreations (p.p., 1923)
Lingual Exercises (p.p., 1925)
Selected Poems (Heinemann, 1925)
Satirical Poems (Heinemann, 1926)
The Heart’s Journey (Heinemann, 1928)
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Faber & Gwyer, 1928)
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Faber & Faber, 1930)
Poems by Pinchbeck Lyre (Duckworth, 1931)
The Road to Ruin (Faber & Faber, 1933)
Vigils (Heinemann, 1935)
Sherston’s Progress (Faber & Faber, 1936)
Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (Faber & Faber, 1937)
The Old Century (Faber & Faber, 1938)
On Poetry (University of Bristol Press, 1939)
Rhymed Ruminations (Faber & Faber, 1940)
Poems Newly Selected (Faber & Faber, 1940)
The Weald of Youth (Faber & Faber, 1942)
Siegfried’s Journey (Faber & Faber, 1945)
Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 1947)
Meredith (Constable, 1948)
Common Chords (p.p., 1950/1951)
Emblems of Experience (p.p., 1951)
The Tasking (p.p., 1954)
Sequences (Faber & Faber, 1956)
Lenten Illuminations (p.p., 1958)
The Path to Peace (Stanbrook Abbey Press, 1960)
Collected Poems 1908-1956 (Faber & Faber, 1961)
The War Poems (Faber & Faber, 1983)
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Images:
1. Real hero Siegfried Sassoon - Conscience on and off the Battlefield
2. Siegfried Sassoon 'Man it seemed had been created to jab the life out of Germans'
3. Siegfried Sassoon and David Thomas
4. The Military Cross medal that Siegfried Sassoon 'threw into the Mersey in anti-war protest'
Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet's Life
Max Egremont tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon, one of the most famous famous young writers of the 1910's, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and an inspiration to Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence.
Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. As a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.
He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster while trying to grow as a poet in peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the aristocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into the group of "bright young things" who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate but fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism. From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont's definitive biography, which draws from unprecedented access to Sassoon's complete papers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qnw8SMRAiA
Biographies;
1. greatwarliterature.co.uk/siegfried-sassoon
2. warpoets.org/conflicts/great-war/siegfried-sassoon-1886-1967
1. Background from {[https://www.greatwarliterature.co.uk/siegfried-sassoon/]}
Born on 8th September 1886, Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was the second of three sons of Alfred and Theresa Sassoon. His parents separated when he was four years old, leaving his mother to raise her three sons alone. Nonetheless, Sassoon spent a happy and secure childhood and was educated at Marlborough before going on to Clare College, Cambridge, although he failed to obtain a degree. Back home in Kent, Sassoon lived the life of a country squire, as well as writing poetry, some of which was shown to the influential art collector, Edward Marsh, who quickly became friends with Sassoon, introducing him to several other literary celebrities, including Rupert Brooke.
Upon the outbreak of war, Sassoon immediately enlisted as a Trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, but a bad fall while riding left him with a broken arm. When he had recovered from this injury, Sassoon transferred to the infantry and was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers in May 1915, leaving for France that November, following training.
Sassoon’s war soon became personal. He received news of the death of his brother Hamo in Gallipoli in November 1915, then in March 1916, his close friend Second Lieutenant David Thomas was shot and killed. The tone of Sassoon’s poetry changed from this moment on, as did his attitude to the war: he wanted to avenge these deaths, regardless of his own personal safety and his exploits earned him the nickname “Mad Jack”, as well as a Military Cross.
In mid-1916, Sassoon was sent back to England, suffering from trench fever, and didn’t return to the trenches until February 1917, where he participated in the First Battle of the Scarpe and was wounded in the shoulder. By the end of April, Sassoon was back in England again.
While convalescing from his wound, Sassoon became more and more embittered about he war and also fell under the influence of a group of pacifists, including John Middleton Murry and Bertrand Russell. The culmination of these events was Sassoon’s now famous Declaration against the validity of the war. Once knowledge of his Declaration became public, his friends, especially Marsh and Graves, tried to convince him that his aim of being court-martialled would never be permitted. Sassoon therefore, reluctantly, agreed to attend a medical board and, following evidence from Robert Graves, was declared as suffering from shell-shock. On 23rd July, he was admitted to Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Edinburgh, where he came under the care of Dr. William H. R. Rivers.
While at Craiglockhart, Sassoon wrote some of his most affecting and effective poetry. He also met Wilfred Owen (a fellow patient) and the two quickly became friends. Sassoon’s influence over Owen’s poetry is obvious, but Owen also idolised the older poet and war hero.
Under the influence of Rivers’s treatment, Sassoon came to realise that he could no longer tolerate remaining safely in Scotland while his men were suffering in France. On 26th November, he was declared fit for active service and left for Palestine in mid-February 1918, only returning to France in May. On 13th July, Sassoon was in No Man’s Land when he stood up and removed his helmet, whereupon he was shot in the head. He later discovered that it was one of his own men who had delivered the blow, believing him to be an advancing German. The wound was not fatal, but resulted in the end of the Sassoon’s war and he was placed on indefinite sick leave, eventually being discharged from the army in March 1919, with the rank of Captain.
Sassoon waited for several months to hear from Owen and it was quite some while before he heard of the younger poet’s death on 4th November 1918. Immediately after the war, Sassoon threw himself into literary work, meeting Thomas Hardy and T. E. Lawrence, among others, and becoming literary editor of the Daily Herald, in which position he was able to advance the career of Edmund Blunden, who became a lifelong friend.
In 1928, Sassoon began writing his autobiographies, initially as fictionalised accounts and then in non-fiction versions, as well as continuing to write poetry. During the 1920’s, Sassoon’s homosexuality became a more important part of his life and he embarked upon a few romantic liaisons, most notably with Stephen Tennant. Eventually, however, Sassoon tired of the fickle nature of these relationships and he married Hester Gatty in December 1933. They lived at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire and had one son, named George, in 1936. The marriage did not last, however, and the couple separated in 1945. In 1957 Sassoon converted to the Roman Catholic faith and he died on September 1st 1967.
Siegfried Sassoon’s war poetry is often – and unjustly – eclipsed by that of Wilfred Owen and yet Sassoon’s poems contain a brutal honesty that is lacking from almost every other poet in this genre. This, mingled with his humorous, ironic and occasionally lyrical style allows us to see the effects of the war: the anger, the waste, the bitterness; but underneath all of that, we can see the unutterable sadness of the “world’s worst wound” as Sassoon called the conflict, and a love for his fellow sufferers that few would succeed in conveying so beautifully or so honestly."
2. Background from {[https://www.warpoets.org/conflicts/great-war/siegfried-sassoon-1886-1967/]}
The War Poets Association
Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967)
Siegfried Sassoon was the product of two very different cultures, his Jewish father’s family of merchant princes from Baghdad and his English mother’s Thornycroft farming ancestors, turned sculptors, painters and engineers. The second of three sons, he grew up in rural Kent, where his father abandoned the family before Siegfried was five, dying four years later. After a late entry into the school system Siegfried failed to complete his formal education at Cambridge, devoting himself instead over the next seven years to poetry, horses, cricket and golf. He was also coming to terms with his homosexuality, in an age which criminalized it.
When War was declared on 4 August 1914 Sassoon had already enlisted enthusiastically, first as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, later transferring to the Royal Welch Fusiliers in May 1915. The death of his younger brother in the Dardanelles in November 1915, his departure for the Western Front and his meeting with Robert Graves in France were significant factors in his changing attitude towards the War. Initially a fervent patriot writing in the vein of Rupert Brooke (see ‘Absolution’ and ‘To My Brother’), by the time his first collection of war poems, ‘The Old Huntsman, was published in May 1917 his tone had become predominantly angry, his style largely satiric, establishing him in poems like ‘Blighters’, ‘The One-Legged Man’ and ‘They’ as one of the most influential and historically important poets of the First World War.
Despite his courageous, at times almost foolhardy, acts in the face of danger, which won him a Military Cross and the nickname ‘Mad Jack’, Sassoon’s opposition to the War hardened even further as he witnessed first the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, then the Battle of Arras in April 1917. It was while convalescing from a wound received in the latter and in close contact with Lady Ottoline Morrell and her pacifist circle that he made his famous anti-war protest, which was read out in Parliament in late July 1917 and published in The Times the following day.
Committed to a shell-shock hospital, Craiglockhart, in an attempt to silence him, Sassoon was brought into contact with Wilfred Owen, whose poetry was deeply affected by the encounter. He also met there the eminent psychiatrist Dr Rivers, who persuaded him to return to the fighting. After a few months in Palestine with the 25th Royal Welch Fusiliers, Sassoon arrived back in France in April 1918. Promoted to the rank of Captain, he commanded his Company until July 1918, when he was wounded in the head while holding the trenches in front of St Venant.
Sassoon’s return to England coincided with the publication of his second collection of war poems, Counter-Attack, which contained many of his most effective satires on the war-mongers, including ‘Base Details’, ‘Does It Matter?’, ‘The Glory of Women’ and ‘The General’:
‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
* * *
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
In this poem the anger is focused on those most directly responsible for the soldiers’ fate. The germ of this brief but highly effective satire seems to have come from an incident in Sassoon’s journey to Arras, when his regiment, the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers, had passed their Corps Commander, Lt.-Gen. Maxse. In the poem the unsuspecting soldiers’ praise of their General’s bluff heartiness is contrasted starkly with the results of his incompetence, just as his speech is contrasted with the soldiers’ cheerful slang. The use of generic names – ‘Harry’ and ‘Jack’ – which both personalizes and depersonalizes them, and the General’s breezily repeated greeting, together with Harry’s ironic comment and the brutal ending, convey the situation far more vividly than a more discursive piece. The colloquial ‘did for them both’, which follows unexpectedly on what appears to be the concluding rhyming couplet, is all the more shocking for its euphemism. It is even more effective than Sassoon’s original ‘murdered them both’, to which several of his mentors had objected.
* * *
The War had really ended for Sassoon when he left France in July 1918, though technically he remained in the army on indefinite sick-leave until 11 March 1919, when the London Gazette announced his retirement. He later objected to being known mainly as a war-poet, but he was endlessly to recycle the material which had initially made his name. Less than a decade after the publication of Counter-Attack he would return to the War for a prose trilogy which was to consolidate his fame: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936). And when that was completed he returned to the same material for the third time in his three-volume autobiography, The Old Century (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried’s Journey (1945). Significantly, a fourth volume, not based on his War experiences, was left unfinished. As though caught in a time warp, Sassoon seems to have had a compulsive need to re-live that particular part of his life in his work.
It might be argued that the War both made and unmade Sassoon. As a young man determined to be a poet but with no clear sense of direction, it had given him a subject as well as the experience and passion to turn that subject into memorable verse. And as a mature writer who appeared again to have lost a sense of direction, the War provided the way forward in his fictional and autobiographical prose trilogies. When that material was finally exhausted, however, so too was Sassoon’s creative impulse. A failed marriage and increasing loneliness, exacerbated by the departure of his only child, George, for school and university, led him eventually to the Roman Catholic Church. There, in his last decade, he found a new subject for his poetry and a tranquil end to his turbulent life.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Bibliography: Works by Siegfried Sassoon (in order of publication)
The Daffodil Murderer (John Richmond, 1913)
The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (Heinemann, 1917)
Counter-Attack and Other Poems (Heinemann, 1918)
Picture Show (Privately printed, 1919)
War Poems (Heinemann, 1919)
Recreations (p.p., 1923)
Lingual Exercises (p.p., 1925)
Selected Poems (Heinemann, 1925)
Satirical Poems (Heinemann, 1926)
The Heart’s Journey (Heinemann, 1928)
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Faber & Gwyer, 1928)
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Faber & Faber, 1930)
Poems by Pinchbeck Lyre (Duckworth, 1931)
The Road to Ruin (Faber & Faber, 1933)
Vigils (Heinemann, 1935)
Sherston’s Progress (Faber & Faber, 1936)
Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (Faber & Faber, 1937)
The Old Century (Faber & Faber, 1938)
On Poetry (University of Bristol Press, 1939)
Rhymed Ruminations (Faber & Faber, 1940)
Poems Newly Selected (Faber & Faber, 1940)
The Weald of Youth (Faber & Faber, 1942)
Siegfried’s Journey (Faber & Faber, 1945)
Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 1947)
Meredith (Constable, 1948)
Common Chords (p.p., 1950/1951)
Emblems of Experience (p.p., 1951)
The Tasking (p.p., 1954)
Sequences (Faber & Faber, 1956)
Lenten Illuminations (p.p., 1958)
The Path to Peace (Stanbrook Abbey Press, 1960)
Collected Poems 1908-1956 (Faber & Faber, 1961)
The War Poems (Faber & Faber, 1983)
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In Our Time: S9/37 Siegfried Sassoon (June 7 2007)
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. In 1916 the Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for "conspic...
In Our Time: S9/37 Siegfried Sassoon (June 7, 2007)
"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. In 1916 the Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for "conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches". The citation noted that he had braved "rifle and bomb fire" and that "owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in". The hero in question was the poet, Siegfried Sassoon. And yet a year later, and at great personal risk, Sassoon publicly denounced the conduct of the war in which he had fought so well.Although famous for his bitter, satirical verses and his denunciation of the conduct of the war which landed him in Craiglockhart mental hospital there is much more to this man of contradictions. A mentor to Wilfred Owen, arch enemy of T.S. Eliot and the Modernist movement, his life included a string of homosexual affairs, a failed marriage, a religious conversion and several tumultuous arguments with literary friends. Notably Robert Graves. He was also an obsessive diarist and writer of autobiography and he continued to write poetry until his death, from cancer, in 1967. But how significant a poet is Siegfried Sassoon, what version of Englishness did this half-Jewish, homosexual cricket lover invent for himself and how do you explain the mind of a man who bitterly opposed the First World War, yet fought in it with an almost insane ferocity?
With Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London and a biographer of Sassoon; Fran Brearton, Reader in English and Assistant Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at the University of Belfast; Max Egremont, a biographer of Siegfried Sassoon."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_2hxW5uAk
Images:
1.Alfred Sassoon shortly before his death at 34, with his sons, Siegfried, Michael and Hamos, the last named , killed at Gallipoli, is commemorated by Siegfried in his poem 'To my brother.'
2. Trooper Siegfried Sassoon, 14th Welsh Fusiliers
3. Siegfried Sassoon wearing his uniform in camp
4. Sassoon in later life.
Background from {[https://spartacus-educational.com/Jsassoon.htm]}
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon, the second of the three sons of Alfred Ezra Sassoon (1861–1895) and his wife, Georgiana Thornycroft Sassoon (1853–1947), daughter of Thomas Thornycroft was born on 8th September 1886 at Weirleigh, near Brenchley in Kent.
Alfred Sassoon was a wealthy Jewish businessman but he died of tuberculosis when Siegfried was a child and he and his brothers were brought up by their mother and her talented family (both her parents were artists). Siegfried later recalled he had a lonely childhood: "As a consequence of my loneliness, I created in my childish day-dreams an ideal companion who became much more of a reality than such unfriendly boys as I encountered at Christmas parties".
Sassoon was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College. It was while he was at Cambridge University that he realised he was an homosexual and had a serious sexual relationship with a fellow student, David Cuthbert Thomas. He left without a degree and for the next eight years lived the life of a country gentleman. He spent his time hunting, playing sports and writing poetry. Published privately, Sassoon's poetry made very little impact on the critics or the book buying public.
On the outbreak of the First World War Sassoon enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry. In May 1915 Sassoon became an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and was posted to the Western Front in France. While in France he met the poet, Robert Graves, and the two men became close friends. In November 1915 Sassoon's younger brother Hamo Sassoon was killed in the Gallipoli Campaign. Four months later, his former boyfriend, David Cuthbert Thomas, was killed in France. These deaths inspired such poems as The Last Meeting and A Letter Home.
Considered to be recklessly brave, Siegfried Sassoon acquired the nickname "Mad Jack". In June 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross for bringing a wounded lance-corporal back to the British lines while under heavy fire. Later he was unsuccessfully recommended for the VC for capturing a German trench single-handedly. After being wounded in April 1917, Sassoon was sent back to England.
Sassoon had grown increasingly angry about the tactics being employed by the British Army and after a meeting with Bertrand Russell, John Murry Middleton and H. W. Massingham, he wrote Finished With War: A Soldier's Declaration, which announced that "I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation."
In July 1917 Sassoon arranged for a sympathetic Labour Party MP to read out the statement in the House of Commons. It was also published by Sylvia Pankhurst in her newspaper, The Woman's Dreadnought. Instead of the expected court martial, the under-secretary for war declared "A breach of discipline has been committed but no disciplinary action has been taken, since Second Lieutenant Sassoon has been reported by the medical board as not being responsible for his action, as he was suffering from nervous breakdown." Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh. During his three months there he made two important friendships: the psychologist and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, and the young poet Wilfred Owen, whom he encouraged and helped, and worked with on the hospital's literary journal, The Hydra.
Sassoon suggested that Owen should write in a more direct, colloquial style. Over the next few months Owen wrote a series of poems, including Anthem for Doomed Youth, Disabled and Dulce et Decorum Est. Until he met Sassoon his few war poems had been patriotic and heroic. Under the influence of Sassoon his thoughts and style changed dramatically. During this time he wrote: "All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful". Jon Stallworthy has pointed out: "The older poet's advice and encouragement, showing the younger how to channel memories of battle - recurring in obsessive nightmares which were a symptom of shell-shock - into a poem such as Dulce et decorum est, complemented Dr Brock's ‘work-cure’. The final manuscript of Anthem for Doomed Youth carries suggestions (including that of the title) in Sassoon's handwriting. Owen's confidence grew, his health returned, and in October a medical board decided that he was fit for light duties."
Sassoon's hostility to war was also reflected in his poetry. During the First World War Sassoon developed a harshly satirical style that he used to attack the incompetence and inhumanity of senior military officers. These poems caused great controversy when they were published in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Edgell Rickword, was one of those soldiers who read Sassoon's poems during the war. He later recalled how the poems came as a revelation of how war could be dealt with "in the vocabulary of war" and gave him "a start towards writing more colloquially, and not in a second-hand literary fashion".
Adam Hochschild, the author of To End All Wars (2011), has pointed out: "His protest soon dropped out of the newspapers. His time in the hospital produced no dividend for the peace movement, but an enormous one for English literature. A fellow patient was the 24-year-old aspiring writer Wilfred Owen, recovering from wounds and shell shock, to whom the older Sassoon offered crucial encouragement. Owen became the greatest poet of the war. The War Office had been extremely shrewd. After three months in the hospital whose services he did not need, Sassoon found himself increasingly restless. Finally he accepted a promotion to first lieutenant and returned to the front. He did so not because he had abandoned his former views, but because, as he put it in his diary when he was back with his regiment in France, I am only here to look after some men. It was a haunting reminder of the fierce power of group loyalty over that of political conviction-and all the more so because it came from someone who had not in the slightest changed, nor ever in his life would change, his belief that his country's supposed war aims were fraudulent."
Despite his public attacks on the way the war was being managed, Sassoon, like Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, agreed to continue to fight. Sassoon was sent to Palestine. In May he rejoined his old battalion in France, and in July 1918 was wounded again, this time in the head. and France before further injuries forced him to return to England. Owen however was killed at Sambre–Oise Canal on 4th November 1918. A week later the Armistice was signed.
Sassoon became a socialist and in March 1919 George Lansbury appointed him as the literary editor of the left-wing The Daily Herald. During this period Sassoon recruited Edmund Blunden, David Garnett, Katherine Mansfield, Havelock Ellis, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Edgell Rickword, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Roy Campbell, Lascelles Abercrombie and A. E. Coppard.
Sassoon's biographer, Rupert Hart-Davis has claimed: "All his life Sassoon kept copious diaries. Those for the years 1920–25 show him torn politically, the possessor of a private income with an uncomfortable socialist conscience; torn artistically, preferring eighteenth-century poetry to that of his modernist contemporaries, and longing - but unable - to write a Proustian masterpiece; and torn emotionally by a succession of disappointing homosexual relationships."
In the late 1920s Sassoon turned to writing prose. He wrote the semi-autobiographical books, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Although he had enjoyed a long-term relationship with the writer, Stephen Tennant, Sassoon married Hester Gatty on 18th December 1933. They settled at Heytesbury House, near Warminster in Wiltshire, where Sassoon spent the rest of his life. Their son, George Sassoon, was born in 1936.
Other books by Sassoon included Sherston's Progress (1936) and three volumes of autobiography, The Old Century (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried's Journey (1945). In 1948 he published a critical biography of George Meredith, and all the time he was writing poetry, published in private or public editions, which culminated in the Collected Poems (1961).
According to Rupert Hart-Davis: "Sassoon was strikingly distinguished in appearance, his large bold features expressing the courage and sensitivity of his nature, and he retained his slimness and agility into old age, playing cricket well into his seventies. A dedicated artist, he hated publicity but craved the right sort of recognition. He was appointed CBE in 1951, and was pleased by the award of the queen's medal for poetry in 1957 and by his honorary degree of DLitt at Oxford in 1965, but he pretended that such honours were merely a nuisance. A natural recluse, he yet much enjoyed the company of chosen friends, many of them greatly his juniors, and was a witty and lively talker. He loved books, pictures, and music, and was a brilliant letter writer."
Siegfried Sassoon died at his Heytesbury home on 1st September 1967, and was buried in Mells Churchyard, Somerset.
(1) Siegfried Sassoon, Because We Are Going (1915)
Because we are going from our wonted places
To be task-ridden by one shattering Aim,
And terror hides in all our laughing faces
That had no will to die, no thirst for fame,
Hear our last word. In Hell we seek for Heaven;
The agony of wounds shall make us clean;
And the failures of our sloth shall be forgiven
When Silence holds the songs that might have been,
And what we served remains, superb, unshaken,
England, our June of blossom that shines above
Disastrous War; for whom we have forsaken
Ways that were rich and gleeful and filled with love.
Thus are we heroes; since we might not choose
To live where Honour gave us life to lose.
(2) Siegfried Sassoon described in his diary details of a patrol into No Man's Land that took place on 25th May 1916.
Twenty-seven men with faces blackened and shiny - with hatchets in their belts, bombs in pockets, knobkerries - waiting in a dug-out in the reserve line. At 10.30 they trudge up to Battalion H.Q. splashing through the mire and water in a chalk trench, while the rain comes steadily down. Then up to the front-line. In a few minutes they have gone over and disappeared into the rain and darkness.
I am sitting on the parapet listening for something to happen - five, ten, nearly fifteen minutes - not a sound - nor a shot fired - and only the usual flare-lights. Then one of the men comes crawling back; I follow him to our trench and he tells me that they can't get through. They are all going to throw a bomb and retire.
A minute or two later a rifle-shot rings out and almost simultaneously several bombs are thrown by both sides; there are blinding flashes and explosions, rifle-shots, the scurry of feet, curses and groans, and stumbling figures loom up and scramble over the parapet - some wounded. When I've counted sixteen in, I go forward to see how things are going. Other wounded men crawl in; I find one hit in the leg; he says O'Brien is somewhere down the crater badly wounded. They are still throwing bombs and firing at us: the sinister sound of clicking bolts seem to be very near; perhaps they have crawled out of their trench and are firing from behind the advanced wire.
At last I find O'Brien down a deep (about twenty-five feet) and precipitous crater. He is moaning and his right arm is either broken or almost shot off: he is also hit in the right leg. Another man is with him; he is hit in the right arm. I leave them there and get back to the trench for help, shortly afterwards Lance-Corporal Stubbs is brought in (he has had his foot blown off). I get a rope and two more men and go back to O'Brien, who is unconscious now. With great difficulty we get him half-way up the face of the crater; it is now after one o'clock and the sky is beginning to get lighter. I make one more journey to our trench for another strong man and to see to a stretcher being ready. We get him in, and it is found that he has died, as I had feared.
(3) Siegfried Sassoon, Glory of Women (1917)
You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops 'retire'
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses - blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
(4) Siegfried Sassoon, Suicide in the Trenches (1917)
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
(5) Siegfried Sassoon, Soldier's Declaration (15th June, 1917)
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.
(6) Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars (2011)
Far from being thrown in jail, Sassoon was ordered to wait in a hotel in Liverpool. While there, he angrily threw his Military Cross ribbon into the River Mersey-but with no audience, the gesture went unreported. Instead of the public stage he had hoped for, Sassoon was sent off to the comfortable surroundings of a rehabilitation hospital for shell-shocked officers in Scotland. His protest soon dropped out of the newspapers. His time in the hospital produced no dividend for the peace movement, but an enormous one for English literature. A fellow patient was the 24-year-old aspiring writer Wilfred Owen, recovering from wounds and shell shock, to whom the older Sassoon offered crucial encouragement. Owen became the greatest poet of the war.
The War Office had been extremely shrewd. After three months in the hospital whose services he did not need, Sassoon found himself increasingly restless. Finally he accepted a promotion to first lieutenant and returned to the front. He did so not because he had abandoned his former views, but because, as he put it in his diary when he was back with his regiment in France, "I am only here to look after some men." It was a haunting reminder of the fierce power of group loyalty over that of political conviction-and all the more so because it came from someone who had not in the slightest changed, nor ever in his life would change, his belief that his country's supposed war aims were fraudulent.
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"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. In 1916 the Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for "conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches". The citation noted that he had braved "rifle and bomb fire" and that "owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in". The hero in question was the poet, Siegfried Sassoon. And yet a year later, and at great personal risk, Sassoon publicly denounced the conduct of the war in which he had fought so well.Although famous for his bitter, satirical verses and his denunciation of the conduct of the war which landed him in Craiglockhart mental hospital there is much more to this man of contradictions. A mentor to Wilfred Owen, arch enemy of T.S. Eliot and the Modernist movement, his life included a string of homosexual affairs, a failed marriage, a religious conversion and several tumultuous arguments with literary friends. Notably Robert Graves. He was also an obsessive diarist and writer of autobiography and he continued to write poetry until his death, from cancer, in 1967. But how significant a poet is Siegfried Sassoon, what version of Englishness did this half-Jewish, homosexual cricket lover invent for himself and how do you explain the mind of a man who bitterly opposed the First World War, yet fought in it with an almost insane ferocity?
With Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London and a biographer of Sassoon; Fran Brearton, Reader in English and Assistant Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at the University of Belfast; Max Egremont, a biographer of Siegfried Sassoon."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_2hxW5uAk
Images:
1.Alfred Sassoon shortly before his death at 34, with his sons, Siegfried, Michael and Hamos, the last named , killed at Gallipoli, is commemorated by Siegfried in his poem 'To my brother.'
2. Trooper Siegfried Sassoon, 14th Welsh Fusiliers
3. Siegfried Sassoon wearing his uniform in camp
4. Sassoon in later life.
Background from {[https://spartacus-educational.com/Jsassoon.htm]}
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon, the second of the three sons of Alfred Ezra Sassoon (1861–1895) and his wife, Georgiana Thornycroft Sassoon (1853–1947), daughter of Thomas Thornycroft was born on 8th September 1886 at Weirleigh, near Brenchley in Kent.
Alfred Sassoon was a wealthy Jewish businessman but he died of tuberculosis when Siegfried was a child and he and his brothers were brought up by their mother and her talented family (both her parents were artists). Siegfried later recalled he had a lonely childhood: "As a consequence of my loneliness, I created in my childish day-dreams an ideal companion who became much more of a reality than such unfriendly boys as I encountered at Christmas parties".
Sassoon was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College. It was while he was at Cambridge University that he realised he was an homosexual and had a serious sexual relationship with a fellow student, David Cuthbert Thomas. He left without a degree and for the next eight years lived the life of a country gentleman. He spent his time hunting, playing sports and writing poetry. Published privately, Sassoon's poetry made very little impact on the critics or the book buying public.
On the outbreak of the First World War Sassoon enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry. In May 1915 Sassoon became an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and was posted to the Western Front in France. While in France he met the poet, Robert Graves, and the two men became close friends. In November 1915 Sassoon's younger brother Hamo Sassoon was killed in the Gallipoli Campaign. Four months later, his former boyfriend, David Cuthbert Thomas, was killed in France. These deaths inspired such poems as The Last Meeting and A Letter Home.
Considered to be recklessly brave, Siegfried Sassoon acquired the nickname "Mad Jack". In June 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross for bringing a wounded lance-corporal back to the British lines while under heavy fire. Later he was unsuccessfully recommended for the VC for capturing a German trench single-handedly. After being wounded in April 1917, Sassoon was sent back to England.
Sassoon had grown increasingly angry about the tactics being employed by the British Army and after a meeting with Bertrand Russell, John Murry Middleton and H. W. Massingham, he wrote Finished With War: A Soldier's Declaration, which announced that "I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation."
In July 1917 Sassoon arranged for a sympathetic Labour Party MP to read out the statement in the House of Commons. It was also published by Sylvia Pankhurst in her newspaper, The Woman's Dreadnought. Instead of the expected court martial, the under-secretary for war declared "A breach of discipline has been committed but no disciplinary action has been taken, since Second Lieutenant Sassoon has been reported by the medical board as not being responsible for his action, as he was suffering from nervous breakdown." Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh. During his three months there he made two important friendships: the psychologist and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, and the young poet Wilfred Owen, whom he encouraged and helped, and worked with on the hospital's literary journal, The Hydra.
Sassoon suggested that Owen should write in a more direct, colloquial style. Over the next few months Owen wrote a series of poems, including Anthem for Doomed Youth, Disabled and Dulce et Decorum Est. Until he met Sassoon his few war poems had been patriotic and heroic. Under the influence of Sassoon his thoughts and style changed dramatically. During this time he wrote: "All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful". Jon Stallworthy has pointed out: "The older poet's advice and encouragement, showing the younger how to channel memories of battle - recurring in obsessive nightmares which were a symptom of shell-shock - into a poem such as Dulce et decorum est, complemented Dr Brock's ‘work-cure’. The final manuscript of Anthem for Doomed Youth carries suggestions (including that of the title) in Sassoon's handwriting. Owen's confidence grew, his health returned, and in October a medical board decided that he was fit for light duties."
Sassoon's hostility to war was also reflected in his poetry. During the First World War Sassoon developed a harshly satirical style that he used to attack the incompetence and inhumanity of senior military officers. These poems caused great controversy when they were published in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Edgell Rickword, was one of those soldiers who read Sassoon's poems during the war. He later recalled how the poems came as a revelation of how war could be dealt with "in the vocabulary of war" and gave him "a start towards writing more colloquially, and not in a second-hand literary fashion".
Adam Hochschild, the author of To End All Wars (2011), has pointed out: "His protest soon dropped out of the newspapers. His time in the hospital produced no dividend for the peace movement, but an enormous one for English literature. A fellow patient was the 24-year-old aspiring writer Wilfred Owen, recovering from wounds and shell shock, to whom the older Sassoon offered crucial encouragement. Owen became the greatest poet of the war. The War Office had been extremely shrewd. After three months in the hospital whose services he did not need, Sassoon found himself increasingly restless. Finally he accepted a promotion to first lieutenant and returned to the front. He did so not because he had abandoned his former views, but because, as he put it in his diary when he was back with his regiment in France, I am only here to look after some men. It was a haunting reminder of the fierce power of group loyalty over that of political conviction-and all the more so because it came from someone who had not in the slightest changed, nor ever in his life would change, his belief that his country's supposed war aims were fraudulent."
Despite his public attacks on the way the war was being managed, Sassoon, like Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, agreed to continue to fight. Sassoon was sent to Palestine. In May he rejoined his old battalion in France, and in July 1918 was wounded again, this time in the head. and France before further injuries forced him to return to England. Owen however was killed at Sambre–Oise Canal on 4th November 1918. A week later the Armistice was signed.
Sassoon became a socialist and in March 1919 George Lansbury appointed him as the literary editor of the left-wing The Daily Herald. During this period Sassoon recruited Edmund Blunden, David Garnett, Katherine Mansfield, Havelock Ellis, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Edgell Rickword, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Roy Campbell, Lascelles Abercrombie and A. E. Coppard.
Sassoon's biographer, Rupert Hart-Davis has claimed: "All his life Sassoon kept copious diaries. Those for the years 1920–25 show him torn politically, the possessor of a private income with an uncomfortable socialist conscience; torn artistically, preferring eighteenth-century poetry to that of his modernist contemporaries, and longing - but unable - to write a Proustian masterpiece; and torn emotionally by a succession of disappointing homosexual relationships."
In the late 1920s Sassoon turned to writing prose. He wrote the semi-autobiographical books, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Although he had enjoyed a long-term relationship with the writer, Stephen Tennant, Sassoon married Hester Gatty on 18th December 1933. They settled at Heytesbury House, near Warminster in Wiltshire, where Sassoon spent the rest of his life. Their son, George Sassoon, was born in 1936.
Other books by Sassoon included Sherston's Progress (1936) and three volumes of autobiography, The Old Century (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried's Journey (1945). In 1948 he published a critical biography of George Meredith, and all the time he was writing poetry, published in private or public editions, which culminated in the Collected Poems (1961).
According to Rupert Hart-Davis: "Sassoon was strikingly distinguished in appearance, his large bold features expressing the courage and sensitivity of his nature, and he retained his slimness and agility into old age, playing cricket well into his seventies. A dedicated artist, he hated publicity but craved the right sort of recognition. He was appointed CBE in 1951, and was pleased by the award of the queen's medal for poetry in 1957 and by his honorary degree of DLitt at Oxford in 1965, but he pretended that such honours were merely a nuisance. A natural recluse, he yet much enjoyed the company of chosen friends, many of them greatly his juniors, and was a witty and lively talker. He loved books, pictures, and music, and was a brilliant letter writer."
Siegfried Sassoon died at his Heytesbury home on 1st September 1967, and was buried in Mells Churchyard, Somerset.
(1) Siegfried Sassoon, Because We Are Going (1915)
Because we are going from our wonted places
To be task-ridden by one shattering Aim,
And terror hides in all our laughing faces
That had no will to die, no thirst for fame,
Hear our last word. In Hell we seek for Heaven;
The agony of wounds shall make us clean;
And the failures of our sloth shall be forgiven
When Silence holds the songs that might have been,
And what we served remains, superb, unshaken,
England, our June of blossom that shines above
Disastrous War; for whom we have forsaken
Ways that were rich and gleeful and filled with love.
Thus are we heroes; since we might not choose
To live where Honour gave us life to lose.
(2) Siegfried Sassoon described in his diary details of a patrol into No Man's Land that took place on 25th May 1916.
Twenty-seven men with faces blackened and shiny - with hatchets in their belts, bombs in pockets, knobkerries - waiting in a dug-out in the reserve line. At 10.30 they trudge up to Battalion H.Q. splashing through the mire and water in a chalk trench, while the rain comes steadily down. Then up to the front-line. In a few minutes they have gone over and disappeared into the rain and darkness.
I am sitting on the parapet listening for something to happen - five, ten, nearly fifteen minutes - not a sound - nor a shot fired - and only the usual flare-lights. Then one of the men comes crawling back; I follow him to our trench and he tells me that they can't get through. They are all going to throw a bomb and retire.
A minute or two later a rifle-shot rings out and almost simultaneously several bombs are thrown by both sides; there are blinding flashes and explosions, rifle-shots, the scurry of feet, curses and groans, and stumbling figures loom up and scramble over the parapet - some wounded. When I've counted sixteen in, I go forward to see how things are going. Other wounded men crawl in; I find one hit in the leg; he says O'Brien is somewhere down the crater badly wounded. They are still throwing bombs and firing at us: the sinister sound of clicking bolts seem to be very near; perhaps they have crawled out of their trench and are firing from behind the advanced wire.
At last I find O'Brien down a deep (about twenty-five feet) and precipitous crater. He is moaning and his right arm is either broken or almost shot off: he is also hit in the right leg. Another man is with him; he is hit in the right arm. I leave them there and get back to the trench for help, shortly afterwards Lance-Corporal Stubbs is brought in (he has had his foot blown off). I get a rope and two more men and go back to O'Brien, who is unconscious now. With great difficulty we get him half-way up the face of the crater; it is now after one o'clock and the sky is beginning to get lighter. I make one more journey to our trench for another strong man and to see to a stretcher being ready. We get him in, and it is found that he has died, as I had feared.
(3) Siegfried Sassoon, Glory of Women (1917)
You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops 'retire'
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses - blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
(4) Siegfried Sassoon, Suicide in the Trenches (1917)
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
(5) Siegfried Sassoon, Soldier's Declaration (15th June, 1917)
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.
(6) Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars (2011)
Far from being thrown in jail, Sassoon was ordered to wait in a hotel in Liverpool. While there, he angrily threw his Military Cross ribbon into the River Mersey-but with no audience, the gesture went unreported. Instead of the public stage he had hoped for, Sassoon was sent off to the comfortable surroundings of a rehabilitation hospital for shell-shocked officers in Scotland. His protest soon dropped out of the newspapers. His time in the hospital produced no dividend for the peace movement, but an enormous one for English literature. A fellow patient was the 24-year-old aspiring writer Wilfred Owen, recovering from wounds and shell shock, to whom the older Sassoon offered crucial encouragement. Owen became the greatest poet of the war.
The War Office had been extremely shrewd. After three months in the hospital whose services he did not need, Sassoon found himself increasingly restless. Finally he accepted a promotion to first lieutenant and returned to the front. He did so not because he had abandoned his former views, but because, as he put it in his diary when he was back with his regiment in France, "I am only here to look after some men." It was a haunting reminder of the fierce power of group loyalty over that of political conviction-and all the more so because it came from someone who had not in the slightest changed, nor ever in his life would change, his belief that his country's supposed war aims were fraudulent.
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