On 1st September 1967 the brave but controversial war poet, Siegfried Sassoon died.
Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about World War I, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. He was also well known as a novelist and political commentator. In 1957 he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family, sometimes called the “Rothschilds of the East” because the family fortune was made in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country gentleman before the World War I, pursuing his two major interests, poetry and fox hunting.
Following the outbreak of the World War I, Sassoon served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, seeing action in France in late 1915. He received a Military Cross for bringing back a wounded soldier during heavy fire. After being wounded in action, Sassoon wrote an open letter of protest to the war department, refusing to fight any more. “I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,” he wrote in the letter. At the urging of Bertrand Russell, the letter was read in the House of Commons. Sassoon expected to be court-martialed for his protest, but poet Robert Graves intervened on his behalf, arguing that Sassoon was suffering from shell-shock and needed medical treatment. In 1917, Sassoon was hospitalized.
After the war, Sassoon became involved in Labour Party politics, lectured on pacifism, and continued to write. His most successful works of this period were his trilogy of autobiographical novels, The Memoirs of George Sherston. In these, he gave a thinly-fictionalized account, with little changed except names, of his wartime experiences, contrasting them with his nostalgic memories of country life before the war and recounting the growth of his pacifist feelings.
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