Selected Poems

by Siegfried Sassoon

75p navy cloth, from a Cambridge college library, spine rubbed, pages unmarked, binding firm, index, very good condition

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC was born into a wealthy banking family, the middle of 3 brothers. His Anglican mother and Jewish father separated when he was five. He had little subsequent contact with ‘Pappy’, who died of TB 4 years later. He presented his mother with his first ‘volume’ at 11. Sassoon spent his youth hunting, cricketing, reading, and writing. He was home-schooled until the age of 14 because of ill health. At school he was academically mediocre and teased for being un-athletic, unusually old, and Jewish. He attended Clare College, Cambridge, but left without taking his degree. In 1911, Sassoon read ‘The Intermediate Sex’ by Edward Carpenter, a book about homosexuality which was a revelation for Sassoon. In 1913 he wrote ‘The Daffodil Murderer,’ a parody of a John Masefield poem and his only pre-war success. A patriotic man, he enlisted on 3rd August, the day before Britain entered the war, as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry. After a riding accident which put him out of action, in May 1915 he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. At the training depot he met David Thomas, with whom he fell in love.
In November, Sassoon received word that his brother Hamo had died at Gallipoli. On 17th November he was shipped to France with David Thomas. He was assigned to C Company, First Battalion. It was here that he met Robert Graves, described in his diary as ‘a young poet in Third Battalion and very much disliked.’ He took part in working parties, but no combat. He later became transport officer and so managed to stay out of the front lines. After time on leave, on the 18th May 1916 he received word that David Thomas had died of a bullet to the throat. Both Graves and Sassoon were distraught, and in Siegfried’s case it inspired ‘the lust to kill.’ He abandoned transport duties and went out on patrols whenever possible, desperate to kill as many Germans as he could, earning him the nickname ‘Mad Jack.’ In April he was recommended for the Military Cross for his action in bringing in the dead and wounded after a raid. He received his medal on the day before the Somme. For the first days of the Somme, he was in reserve opposite Fricourt, watching the slaughter from a ridge. Fricourt was successfully taken, and on the 4th July the First Battalion moved up to the front line to attack Mametz Wood. It was here that he famously took a trench single handed. Unfortunately, Siegfried did nothing to consolidate the trench; he simply sat down and read a book, later returning to a berating from Graves. It was in 1917, convalescing in 'Blighty' from a wound, that he decided to make a stand against the war. Encouraged by pacifist friends, he ignored his orders to return to duty and issued a declaration against the war. The army refused to court martial him, sending him instead to Craiglockhart, an institution for soldiers driven mad by the war. Here he met and influenced Wilfred Owen. In 1918 he briefly returned to active service, in Palestine and then France again, but after being wounded by friendly fire he ended the war convalescing. He reached the rank of captain. After the war he made a predictably unhappy marriage and had a son, George. He continued to write, but is best remembered as a war poet.

Reviews

[Brian Robbins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Previously I had read only the remarkably powerful war poems by Sassoon. Enjoyment would hardly be the right word to describe the experience, rather sheer admiration for brilliance of his work.

When I came to these, I suppose that I foolishly expected to find the same power of voice turned to other experiences of his life. This was not the case: A) it didn’t allow for the unique depth of the experiences that impelled him to create his war poems. B) It did not allow for the profound after-effects these created in him.

If I wanted to find appropriate words to sum up his poems written after WW1, they would be sterile and trivial. They present as the work of a man attempting to find an appropriate voice & appropriate language; a man who felt alienated from the culture, art & social group to which he tried unsuccessfully to reattach himself.

Strangely, they do express very effectively that unbridgeable divide which so many men report when returning from war, between the wartime world they survived & the peacetime world to which they return. The expression he gives to this dislocation seems to be not so much a conscious attempt to embody that experience, more the poems have the nature of an artefact left behind from a period & experience of history.

Only in the final poems, which express his experience of religious conversion & his spiritual life that resulted from this, does he finally seem to find a sense of belonging, and a voice & language through which he can express himself in a positive idiom. It is interesting however, that both the language & the community come ready-made, off-the-peg. They provide to some degree a borrowed identity & a security for which he longed in the earlier, peacetime poems.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a man. He’s arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century and he’s almost completely unknown, even among many poetry circles. We wouldn’t have most of the WWI poets if it weren’t for Sassoon, and he was a very good writer in his own right as well. I would love to read a good biography of his life if one exists.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I meditate upon mankind’s advancement
From flint sparks into million-volted glare
That shows us everything except the future-
And leaves us not much wiser than we were.
- "Cleaning the Candelabrum"