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Siegfried Sassoon – The First Complete Biography of One of Our Greatest War Poets Second Impression Edition
Author(s): John Stuart Roberts (Author)
- Publisher: Metro Books, London
- Publication Date: 14 Jun. 1999
- Edition: Second Impression
- Language: English
- Print length: 320 pages
- ISBN-10: 1860661513
- ISBN-13: 9781860661518
Book Description
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 In writing this biography, John Stuart Roberts has had access to much unpublished material, including the Hart-Davis papers which contain the diaries covering the last 30 years of Sassoon’s life, and also to correspondence between Sassoon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.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon Review
Siegfried Sassoon is mostly remembered for the devastating poetry he wrote during World War One as a result of leading his troops “over the top” to certain death. This episode in his life–when he was sent to military hospital suffering from shell-shock and his heroic return to the Front–is covered extensively in his own writing, and has overshadowed his later literary output. But his more mature poetry is resuscitated in this sensitive, exhaustively researched biography. As well as recounting the friendships “Siggy” famously had with fellow poets Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, Roberts delves into the more private arena of Sassoon’s covert homosexuality and his ill-fated marriage. We learn about Sassoon the passionate golfer and bloodthirsty fox-hunter, all of which adds greater depth to this complex man. Roberts also digs deep into his subject’s psyche to reveal a fixation with father figures which started during the War when he was under analysis (and arose from the early death of his father); and uncovers new sources of information concerning Sassoon’s conversion to Catholicism. This fresh material means that the earlier life is somewhat neglected, but, then, as Sassoon himself said “My real biography is my poetry.” —Lilian Pizzichini
