Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was an English writer who is best remembered today for his stark poetry documenting the horrors of World War I. He drew from his own experiences in the trenches, having fought with the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Western Front beginning in 1915. In many of his poems during this period, as well as in a famous anti-war statement titled "A Soldier's Declaration," Sassoon condemned military generals, politicians, religious officials, and patriotic citizens on the home front for their ineptitude and support of the war. Though he wished to be remembered first and foremost as a devotional poet and secondly as a prose memoirist, it was his war poetry that struck a chord with the public, critics, and scholars.
Sassoon was born in Matfield (a small village near Kent) in 1886 to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother. Sassoon rarely discussed his Sephardic heritage on his father Alfred's side, making uncomfortable remarks or otherwise ignoring his Jewish roots. This heritage does not appear in Sassoon's poems or prose—perhaps he was aware of the possibility of being marked as an outsider. Sassoon's mother, Theresa Thornycroft, came from a family of Anglo-Catholic artists; her parents were both professional sculptors who were descended from farmers. This connection to art and land influenced Sassoon's early poetic focus on rural English life, and he privately published collections such as Twelve Sonnets (1911), Melodies (1912), An Ode for Music (1912), and Hyacinth (1912). Theresa and Alfred Sassoon settled at Weirleigh, a house in the countryside at Kent, where Siegfried led a peaceful pre-war existence. He studied law and history at Clare College, Cambridge, but returned to Weirleigh in 1907 without a degree. There, he happily engaged in his pastimes: hunting, playing cricket and golf, and writing verse.
Most critics dismiss Sassoon's early Georgian pastoral verse as feeble in comparison to his war poetry. According to Sassoon's friend and fellow poet Edmund Blunden, "No poet of twentieth-century England…was originally more romantic and floral than young Siegfried Sassoon from Kent." These early works were mostly concerned with music and the beauty of the natural world, and they expressed the poet's preference for the sonnet. In his book The Weald of Youth, Sassoon connects the practice of writing with piano-playing, stating that his "early verse was vague poetic feeling set to remembered music" (111). The music of Sassoon's poetry would become purposely discordant after he experienced firsthand the violence and chaos of war.
World War I transformed Sassoon as a man and as a writer. His enthusiastic enlistment in 1914 was delayed due to a riding accident. The following year, he served as a second lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Sassoon's earlier war poetry reflects patriotic intentions, but his writing later hardened into the angry and critical tone for which he would later be known. Millions died in the war, and experiencing this carnage greatly impacted Sassoon. While recovering from injuries sustained on the Western Front, he wrote a great deal of poetry by hand, and in 1917, The Old Huntsman and Other Poems became his first published collection of war poems. Fighting on the front lines, Sassoon suffered from witnessing the deaths of his friends, and his near-suicidal exploits earned him the nickname "Mad Jack." He was awarded the Military Cross for bringing back a wounded soldier while under heavy fire. This concern for fellow soldiers is apparent in the compassionate tone in which he writes about them.
The poet's resentment toward the military establishment and overall disillusionment concerning the war effort became palpable in his work. He wrote his famous anti-war statement "A Soldier's Declaration" in 1917, calling the war "evil and unjust." It was a politically controversial document, considering that Sassoon was a decorated officer writing this in the midst of the propaganda-fueled, pro-war culture of the Allied world. This gesture of disobedience received notable publicity: it was read in Parliament and published in The Times. It was only because Sassoon's friend and peer, the influential poet Robert Graves, interceded on Sassoon's behalf that he avoided being court-martialed for desertion and was instead committed to Craiglockhart for treatment of shell shock. While at Craiglockhart, Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, and this encounter proved to be very influential on the younger poet.
The controversy of Sassoon's stance on the war as expressed in "A Soldier's Declaration" and in his poetry endeared him to some and ignited the anger of others. Sassoon himself did not expect to be remembered for his satirical, confrontational, and compassionate war poems. In a letter to the critic Michael Thorpe in 1966, Sassoon wrote, “I was immature, impulsive, irrational and bewildered by the whole affair, hastily improvising my responses and only saved by being true to the experience which I drew upon.” But it was precisely Sassoon's commitment to express the truth of what he experienced during the war that captivated readers. His use of grotesque details, colloquial language, and critique of those in power provided a unique and chilling first-hand account of the war.
After retiring from military service when the war ended, Sassoon became involved in the London literary scene. He published autobiographical novels (the trilogy of The Memoirs of George Sherston) that were well-received, as well as a biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith. Though Sassoon eventually married and had a child, he was remarkably open about his homosexuality during a time when Britain actively persecuted gay men. The early unpublished prose play Amyntas: A Mystery contains homoerotic undertones, though the majority of Sassoon's work does not delve into this part of his life. In his later years, the poet became increasingly devotional, converting to Catholicism in 1957. Spiritual matters became the central focus of his writing even before his conversion. The collection Sequences was published in 1956. Much to Sassoon's disappointment, critics generally consider his religious poetry to be inferior to his war poems published between 1917 and 1920. Sassoon died in 1967 from cancer. From a lifetime of writing, it was Sassoon's war poems that cemented his literary legacy.
