Abstract
The story of the soldier-poet Sassoon is that of a latter-day Doctor Faustus. The young man who was so eager to become a famous poet saw his dream fulfilled, only then to start wondering if the price had been worth paying: the war that made the poet destroyed the man, and Sassoon’s post-war life is mainly one long attempt (he called it his spiritual journey) to find a new equilibrium after a profound experience that left him spiritually and emotionally unsettled. In later life Sassoon complained that his reputation as a war poet had become a burden to him, at the same time expressing amazement at the fact that the naive young man who went to war had succeeded as a war poet at all: “I was immature, impulsive, irrational, and bewildered by the whole affair, hastily improvising my responses, and only saved by being true to the experiences which I drew upon” (LC, 14).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–1918 (London, 1980), p. 21.
Ivor Gurney, War Letters, ed. by R.K.R. Thornton (London, 1984), p. 29. Cf. also p. 130, where he refers to four sonnets that were intended as a 1917 answer to Brooke’s sonnets.
‘War Diary’, 12 June 1917. In: Herbert Read, The Contrary Experience (New York, 1973), p. 89.
Robert Graves (1929), Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 146. Graves’ autobiography, though always readable, is not always reliable. For one thing ‘To Victory’ was written in January 1916, and Sassoon was first in the trenches in November 1915 (though admittedly before March 1916 only with working parties).
See Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915–1918, ed. by Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London, 1974), pp. 90–1.
Organizational tables of the British Army are given in Haythornthwaite, A Photohistory of World War One (London, 1993). For Sassoon’s experiences, cf. his contribution to J.C. Dunn’s, The War the Infantry Knew 1914–1919 (London, 1989), p. 306.
Charles Carrington, Soldier fr•om the Wars Returning (London, 1965), pp. 159–60.
Henri Barbusse: Le Feu (1916). An English translation by W. Fitzwater Wray appeared in 1917 under the title Under Fire. Page reference is to the Everyman edition (London, 1965), p. 44.
Cf. Sassoon’s footnote to ‘In the Pink’ in The War Poems, ed. by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 1983), p. 22, where he adds that the poem was refused by the Westminster “as they thought it might prejudice recruiting!!”.
This first draft is included in the Diaries 1915–1918, pp. 49–50. That he omitted the final stanza when he revised ‘A Working Party’ for publication in The Old Huntsman was probably due to the fact that he considered it too sentimental, going on as it does about “widows grieving down the streets in black / And faded mothers dreaming of bright sons”.
Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: the Poetry of the Great War (Oxford, 1978), p. 132.
Corrigan (1973), p. 21.
War Poems, p. 47. The somewhat apologetic tone of these lines is probably due to the fact that they were written after Sassoon’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Herbert Read, Collected Poems (London, 1966), pp. 37–40. First published in Naked Warriors (1919), the volume singled out by T.S. Eliot in the July 1919 issue of the Egoist as containing “the best war poetry that I can remember having seen”.
Denis Winter, Death’s Men, pp. 59–60.
Wilfred Owen, Collected Letter.s (London, 1967), p. 484.
Cf. Sassoon’s pencilled in changes to ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. by C. Day Lewis (London, 1984),
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, 1975), p. 272.
Cf. Taylor, Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches, p. 17.
Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning, p. 220.
John Oxenham, All’s Well! (London, 1916), p. 7.
This is, of course, in many ways an unfair comparison: Oxenham’s poems were published 18 months before Sassoon’s The Old Hunt.sman. Unfortunately Oxenham’s sales figures are scarce as the Methuen files were lost in the Blitz. Yet Oxenhain’s massive output is in itself a measure of his popular appeal: All’s Well (1915), The King’s High Way (1916), The Vision Splendid (1917), The Fiery Cross (1917), Hearts Courageous (1918), and the sequel to All’s Well: All’.s Clear (1919).
V. de Sola Pinto: Crisis in English Poetry (London, 1963), p. 164. Pinto (1895–1969), later Professor of English at the University of Nottingham and co-editor of D.H. Lawrence’s Complete Poems, was Sassoon’s secondin-command during the latter’s last months in France in the spring and summer of 1918.
Jon Silkin, in his Introduction to The Penguin Book of Firs7 World War Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 28.
That same day Sassoon was shot in the head by one of his own men, when returning from a patrol in no man’s land. He was eventually invalided home.
John Middleton Murry, ‘Mr. Sassoon’s War Verses’, reprinted in The Evolution qfan Intellectual (London, 1927), p. 75.
Sir Rupert Hart-Davis in his introduction to The War Poems, p. 11.
Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) had founded the Cambridge Magazine in 1912 and remained its editor until 1922. In the 1920s he developed ‘Basic English’ together with I.A. Richards.
Thorpe (1966), p. 34. Sassoon himself was also quite pleased with this poem, cf. Siegfried’s Journey, p. 71.
Cf. Katherine Mansfield, Collected Letters — Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 256–61; Virginia Woolf, Letters — Vol. 2 (London, 1976), pp. 262, 270 & Diaries — Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 174; Sassoon, Diaries 19231925, p. 59.
Douglas Goldring, ‘The War and the Poets’ in: Reputations: Essays in Criticism (London, 1920), p. 109.
Copyright information
© 1997 Paul Moeyes
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Moeyes, P. (1997). An Officer and Temporary Rebel. In: Siegfried Sassoon Scorched Glory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374560_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374560_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39412-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37456-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)