Siegfried Sassoon

by JohnStuartRoberts (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.25

  Siegfried Sassoon is the greatest and most famous of all British war poets. Established as a writer of some merit before the Great War broke out, his near-suicidal acts of courage and defiance in the face of enemy fire earned him the Military Cross - and the nickname 'Mad Jack'. However, as the war dragged on, he came to see it as a cynical exercise, leading him to write an anti-war letter to The Times and to tear the ribbon of his MC Cross from his tunic and throw it into the River Mersey. Alarmed authorities sent him to a hospital for the shell shocked, where he befriended a young officer of the Manchester Regiment named Wilfred Owen. Although Sassoon returned to active service, his hatred for the war remained, and by the Armstice in 1918 he had declared himself a pacifist. Written with a clarity and directness that would have pleased the great man himself, John Stuart Roberts's widely praised biography is a gripping and accessible account of a man of deep contradictions. War hero, pacifist, towering literary figure unaligned to any movement; this biography looks beyond the common perception of Sassoon as a mere soldier poet, and looks at the man in full. It is a book that any admirer of Sassoon will cherish.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $3.25

  An essentially private person, Siegfried Sassoon's work nevertheless constitutes a chorus of self-revelation. John Stuart Roberts has written the first full length biography of this complex man. A quintessential Edwardian gentleman, who celebrated the English countryside in his much-loved quasi-autobiography, The Sherston Trilogy , Sassoon nevertheless owed his poetic vision to Sephardic Jewish roots abandoned by his dilettante father before his son's birth. His friendships and contacts ranged widely from Thomas Hardy and Edmund Gosse to the Sitwells, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, T.E. Lawrence, Eddie Marsh and Stephen Tennant. In writing this biography, John Stuart Roberts has had access to much unpublished material, including the Hart-Davis papers which contain the diaries covering the last 30 years of Sassoon's life, and also to correspondence between Sassoon and Eddie Marsh, Edmund Blunden and Dame Felicitas Corrigan OSB. His interviews have ranged from Mother Margaret Mary to cricketer Dennis Silk and poet Ian Davie. Sassoon's homosexuality is examined sensitively, and the war poems are discussed in full, while his inner journey to Catholicism in his final years is charted.