A short life of the author
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English poet, novelist, and memoirist who is remembered primarily for two things: war poetry of blistering directness and anger, and prose memoirs of extraordinary beauty and gentleness. The contrast between the two — between the savage satirist of the trenches and the elegiac chronicler of lost Edwardian England — is one of the most striking in English literature.
Before the War
Sassoon was born into a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family (his father was from the Baghdad Sassoon dynasty; his mother was English). He grew up in the Kent countryside, was educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge (which he left without a degree), and spent his early manhood as a country gentleman — hunting, playing cricket, and writing derivative, Georgian poetry. He later called these years “a lifetime of fiddling,” but they provided the material for his greatest prose.
The War Poet
Sassoon enlisted in August 1914 and served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Western Front. He was decorated for bravery — his men called him “Mad Jack” for his reckless courage in trench raids and patrols — and twice wounded.
His early war poems, collected in The Old Huntsman (1917), are conventional patriotic verse, but by mid-1916 his poetry had transformed. The poems of Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918) are brutally direct, sarcastically angry, and devastatingly specific about the realities of trench warfare:
“If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, / I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base, / And speed glum heroes up the line to death.”
Sassoon’s war poems work through contrast — between the suffering of soldiers and the complacency of civilians, between the language of patriotic rhetoric and the reality of mud, gas, and dismembered bodies. They are propaganda of a kind — anti-war propaganda — but their anger is so precise and their details so specific that they transcend polemic.
The Declaration
In July 1917, Sassoon made a public protest against the continuation of the war, publishing “A Soldier’s Declaration” (also known as “Finished with the War”) in which he accused the political and military authorities of prolonging the conflict for purposes of aggression and conquest. The declaration was read out in Parliament. Rather than court-martial a decorated officer, the authorities arranged for Sassoon to be sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he met the younger poet Wilfred Owen — a meeting that was one of the most consequential in the history of English poetry, as Sassoon’s encouragement and editorial guidance helped Owen become the major poet he became.
The George Sherston Trilogy
Sassoon’s finest prose works are three fictionalised memoirs published as the George Sherston trilogy: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston’s Progress (1936). George Sherston is transparently Sassoon himself, and the trilogy traces the arc from the golden pre-war world of hunting, cricket, and country-house weekends to the horror of the trenches and the psychological devastation of the post-war years.
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize and is one of the most beautiful works of English pastoral prose — a loving, detailed, gently comic portrait of a world that the war annihilated.
Later Life
After the war, Sassoon published several volumes of genuine autobiography — The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried’s Journey, 1916–1920 (1945) — which cover much of the same ground as the Sherston books but include his literary life (the friendships with Hardy, Graves, and Owen) that the fiction omits.
His later poetry is quieter, more introspective, and increasingly spiritual. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957.
Legacy
Sassoon’s war poetry remains among the most widely read and anthologised in the language. The Sherston trilogy deserves recognition as one of the finest extended works of English prose memoir. His influence on Wilfred Owen alone would justify his place in literary history.
Sassoon and Owen
The relationship between Sassoon and Owen at Craiglockhart in 1917 is one of the defining literary friendships of the twentieth century. Sassoon was the established poet — decorated, published, notorious for his declaration; Owen was unknown, unpublished, and suffering from shell shock. Sassoon read Owen’s poems, encouraged him, and — most crucially — showed him that the war could be the subject of poetry of the highest order. The influence was decisive: Owen’s greatest poems — “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Strange Meeting,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth” — were written or revised under Sassoon’s guidance. Owen was killed one week before the Armistice; Sassoon spent the rest of his life haunted by the younger poet’s death and by the conviction that Owen was the greater poet — a conviction that most critics share.
The comparison between the two is instructive: Sassoon’s poems are direct, angry, and satirical — they attack the war’s managers with the precision of a sniper; Owen’s are more complex, more compassionate, more formally innovative, and ultimately more devastating. Sassoon opened the door that Owen walked through, and the debt is freely acknowledged by both parties in their letters and diaries.
Collecting Sassoon
Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918, Heinemann) in first edition is the primary Sassoon collectible. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) first edition — particularly the limited signed edition — is highly sought. Sassoon published many of his poetry collections in limited editions that are valuable to collectors.