Sassoon, Siegfried (1886-1967), English poet and novelist.

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Sassoon, Siegfried (1886-1967), English poet and novelist.

 Sassoon was the son of a Jewish father and Anglican mother who separated when Sassoon was five years old. Educated at Clare College, Cambridge University, where he failed to take his degree, until the age of 28 Sassoon led a life of leisure, hunting and playing cricket, and dabbling a little in poetry. His most serious verse was “The Daffodil Murderer”, begun as a parody of “The Everlasting Mercy” by John Masefield and privately published under the pseudonym Saul Kain in 1913.

 Sassoon’s life, as was the case with so many of his contemporaries, changed radically when he joined the army on the first day of World War I in 1914. From being a supporter of the war who won the Military Cross for his part in the Battle of the Somme—a decoration that he later threw into the River Mersey—Sassoon’s experience of the reality of trench warfare made him an ardent advocate of peace. In 1917, after vehement public protests against the war, Sassoon was persuaded by his friend Robert Graves to avoid court martial and to become a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he was said to be suffering from shell-shock. At Craiglockhart, Sassoon met and influenced the young Wilfrid Owen, whose poetry he published after Owen was killed at the Front. While Sassoon retained his anti-war stance, at Craiglockhart it became apparent to him that his duty lay in sharing the suffering of his men and he returned to active service. A shot to the head, which he nevertheless survived, from one of his own men in July 1918 took him out of the war for good.

 Sassoon’s war poetry underwent dramatic changes during these years. From the early fervour of such poems as “Absolution” and “To My Brother”, which deplore the perils of war yet extol the qualities it brings out in those who fight, Sassoon began to write bitter poems about the horror of life in the trenches. In The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918) Sassoon writes of the realities of trench warfare:

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The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs

High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps

And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,

Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled:

And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,

Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.

“Counter-Attack”

 Not only did Sassoon inveigh against the conditions the soldiers were forced to endure, but he sharply pointed up the contrast between the lives of those who controlled the course of the war and those of the men who fought. “Base Details” is typical of Sassoon’s laconic and satirical style at ...

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