Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon (Matfield, 1886 – Heytesbury, 1967) was an English poet and writer whose work on the First World War made him one of the most recognisable voices of that conflict. He wrote in English, and his importance rests on poems that exposed the horror of the trenches against patriotic rhetoric, and on the autobiographical prose he published later.

Born into a wealthy family of Jewish origin on his father's side, he grew up in Kent. His father died of tuberculosis in 1895, a few years after his parents had separated. He was educated at Marlborough and then at Cambridge, though he never took a degree. In his youth he lived on a modest private income, devoting himself to hunting, cricket and writing. His first success came in 1913 with a parody of John Masefield published under a pseudonym.

When war broke out he enlisted. On the Western Front he earned a reputation for bravery, won the Military Cross in 1916, and was nicknamed 'Mad Jack' by his men. There he met Robert Graves, and the experience changed his writing: his verse grew harsher and took up shattered bodies, filth and cowardice as its subjects. In 1917 he wrote a 'Soldier's Declaration' protesting the continuation of the war. Instead of a court-martial, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he met Wilfred Owen and encouraged him to keep writing.

After the war he worked as literary editor of a socialist newspaper and helped bring Owen's work to a wider public. His broadest recognition came through prose, especially the autobiographical Sherston trilogy. His legacy lies in poetry that broke with patriotic tone and in the way he recorded the war from within.