Siegfried Sassoon
(1886–1967)

A decorated, twice-wounded soldier in World War I, Siegfried Sassoon witnessed first-hand the horrors of trench warfare in France. Like a number of other English writers and poets who saw action in the war, he resolved to portray for his own and future generations the grim reality of war, to show graphically its carnage and despair. No one did it better than he. Although Sassoon wrote for almost 50 years after the Armistice, he produced little to match his searing wartime verses that honor and mourn the "citizens of death's gray land."

Sassoon was born into a wealthy Jewish family in London, and was something of a dilettante before the war. While attending Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge, he found that he preferred hunting, cricket, golf, and ballet to more academic pursuits. Poetry aroused his interest also, and he published a number of pastoral poems and parodies while in his early twenties. In 1913, on the eve of World War I, his long poem, "The Daffodil Murderer," gave evidence of his ability to combine parody with serious self-expression.

When war broke out in 1914, Sassoon joined the army the same day and showed such reckless courage in battle that he earned the nickname "Mad Jack" along with a medal for gallantry. But by the time he was wounded at Arras in April 1917, his attitude toward the supposed glory of war had changed. By then, he was writing what he called "trench poems," the starkly realistic, agonized, sometimes horrifying verses on which his reputation rests. The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918) contain most of his memorable poems.

When Sassoon returned to the front in 1918, a British sentry shot him in the head by mistake, and Sassoon spent the rest of the war in a hospital.

After the Armistice, he continued to write, publishing his first prose work, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, in 1928. Billed as a novel, the book is essentially an autobiography, the first of several autobiographical works. Sasoon married at he age of 47 and settled down in rural Wiltshire. The literary innovations between the two World Wars passed him by. His niche in English literature had already been secured by a few dozen jarring, outraged, unforgettable poems from the trenches.

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