Siegfried Sassoon's gravestone in Mells churchyard

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Vidal Sassoon

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (September 8, 1886 – September 1, 1967) was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I, but later won acclaim for his prose work. more...

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Biography

Early life and education

Sassoon was born in a house named Weirleigh (which still stands) in the village of Matfield, Kent, to a Jewish father and a Protestant English mother. His father, Alfred, one of the wealthy Indian Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family, was disinherited for marrying outside the faith. His mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London—her brother was Sir Hamo Thornycroft. There was no German ancestry in Sassoon's family; he owed his unusual first name to his mother's predilection for the operas of Wagner. His middle name was taken from the surname of a clergyman with whom she was friendly.

Sassoon was educated at The New Beacon Preparatory School, Kent, Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and at Clare College, Cambridge, (of which he was made an honorary fellow in 1953) where he studied both law and history from 1905 to 1907. However, he dropped out of university without a degree, and spent the next few years hunting, playing cricket, and privately publishing a few volumes of not very highly acclaimed poetry. His income was just enough to prevent his having to seek work, but not enough to live extravagantly. His first real success was The Daffodil Murderer, a parody of The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield, published in 1913 under the pseudonym of \"Saul Kain\".

War service

Sassoon, motivated by patriotism, joined the military just as the threat of World War I was realised, and was in service with the Sussex Yeomanry on the day Britain declared war (August 4, 1914). He broke his arm badly in a riding accident and was put out of action before even leaving England; spending the spring of 1915 convalescing. At around this time, his younger brother Hamo was killed at Gallipoli; this hit Siegfried very hard. In May of that year, he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a commissioned officer, and in November, he was sent to First Battalion in France. He was thus brought into contact with Robert Graves, and they became close friends. United by their poetic vocation, they often read and discussed one another's work. Though this did not have much perceptible influence on Graves's poetry, his views on what may be called 'gritty realism' profoundly affected Sassoon's concept of what constituted poetry. He soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely: where his early poems exhibit a Romantic dilettantish sweetness, his war poetry moves to an increasingly discordant music, intended to convey the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience hitherto lulled by patriotic propaganda. Details such as rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide are all trademarks of his work at this time, and this philosophy of 'no truth unfitting' had a significant effect on the movement towards Modernist poetry.