Siegfried Sassoon : The Making of a War Poet, a Biography (1896-1918) [Hardcover]

Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415923255 | ISBN-13: 978-0415923255 | Publication Date: February 23, 1999 | Edition: 1

The World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon is one of the twentieth century's greatest icons and Jean Moorcroft Wilson is the leading authority on him. In Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, the second volume of her best-selling, authorized biography, Wilson completes her definitive analysis of his life and works, exploring Sassoon's experiences after the Great War. For many people, Sassoon exists primarily as a First World War poet and bold fighter, who earned the nickname 'Mad Jack' in the trenches and risked Court Martial, possibly the firing squad, with his public protest against the War. Much less is known about his life after the Armistice. Wilson uncovers a series of love affairs with such larger-than-life characters as Queen Victoria's great-grandson, Prince Phillip of Hess, the flamboyant Ivor Novello and the exotic and bejewelled Hon. Stephen Tennant. This period also sees Sassoon establishing close friendships with some of the greatest literary figures of the age, Hardy, Beerbohm, E. M. Forster and T. E. Lawrence among them. Sassoon himself said that most people thought he had died in 1919. But Wilson shows that his poetry is, if anything, more powerful in the second half of his life. Based on a decade of meticulous research and interviews with many who knew Sassoon well, much of the material is published here for the first time. Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches completes a fascinating story that is beautifully told.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This biography appears in the midst of a small Sassoon revival. Although not the sprightliest of writers, Jean Moorcroft Wilson gives a comprehensive and well-rounded impression of Sassoon, drawing on much new material, including both sides of his correspondence with T.E. Lawrence. "Unlike the many writers who lead sedentary lives," Wilson notes, "[Sassoon] was a man of action caught up in the bloodiest conflict in history." In the early 1920s, still glowing from the success of his poems of the First World War, Sassoon had imagined he would write a "Madame Bovary dealing with sexual inversion." But the poet who patrolled no man's land at night and whose initially romantic verses gradually came to encompass all the horrors of trench warfare could not find the courage to declare his love for men. One of the benefits of this late biography, as Wilson points out, is that she can now write openly of what Sassoon could not. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Reintroduced to contemporary readers by Pat Barker's acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, in which he figures as a major character, Sassoon was the first English soldier-poet to achieve notoriety as an opponent of WWI. A literary dilettante before his experience in the trenches, Sassoon was both made and unmade by the war: the Armistice of 1918 ended his effectiveness as a poet at age 32. Wilson (who has written lives of war poets Charles Hamilton Sorley and Isaac Rosenberg) also ends this biography in 1918, although Sassoon lived on until 1967. Sassoon was remembered primarily for his bitter verse satires about the war, although he "revisited" the conflict with "nostalgic regret" in fictional, then autobiographical, trilogies. His changing attitude hints at a second personal drama running parallel to the war. Like many of the friends to whom he was drawn, the war plunged Captain Sassoon into a male setting that intensified a homosexual longing that found physical expression only after 1918. Paradoxically, he realized, the war, which he excoriated in vivid and often brutal images, also left him "glad to be there," feeling "intensely alive" and a "living antithesis" to his own protests against its wastefulness. These contradictions landed him in a mental hospital. Drawing on his diaries and other writings, this first full-scale biography of Sassoon evokes the writer in such overwhelming detail that his personality sometimes seems buried under it. Nonetheless, it is valuable for its depth of documentation and as a resource for the growing number of Pat Barker fans on these shores. 53 b&w illustrations.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (February 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415923255
• ISBN-13: 978-0415923255
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,787,804 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A much needed biography, January 2, 2000

By 

Laura Canon "longtime reader" (Henderson, NV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Siegfried Sassoon : The Making of a War Poet, a Biography (1896-1918) (Hardcover)

I was stunned several years ago to realize there was no modern biography of Sassoon so I was really looking forward to this book and in the end I was really pleased with it. It is perhaps a little too detailed (descriptions of the personalities of Sassoon's schoolmasters, etc.) and she occasionally jumps around chronologically but Wilson does bring Sassoon to life. Rather than emphasizing his sexuality she puts it into context and she follows his emotional development through his poetry. She also does an excellent job sorting out the confusion of wartime events. I'm looking forward to the next volume of this biography and I'd like to read her bio of Charles Hamilton Sorley, another war poet.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid biography of the great war poet, hero and sportsman, February 15, 2001

By 

C. Raditz (Kenya) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Siegfried Sassoon : The Making of a War Poet, a Biography (1896-1918) (Hardcover)

The biography is artfully crafted with an entertaining balance between story and documentation. I found the level of detail fascinating and not at all constraining, very much like enjoying following brushstrokes in an impressionist landscape. The book broadened and deepened my appreciation of the man, the times, the War and the literary and cultural environment of the first two decades of 20th century Britain.

If Ms Wilson follows with further volumes of Sassoons biography, count me in as an enthusiastic reader!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing, August 29, 2001

By 

"melliepo" (Providence, RI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Siegfried Sassoon : The Making of a War Poet, a Biography (1896-1918) (Hardcover)

I'm ashamed to admit I'm not much of a biography reader. I can actually count on one hand the number of bio's I've completed and they have all been rather fluffy. After reading Pat Barker's wonderful WWI trilogy I was moved to find out more about Sassoon and discovered this book through a library search. I was a bit daunted by its length but have managed to read almost all of it in a couple of weeks. It reads quite easily and has actually at times left me reluctant to put it down. I am inspired to read biographies of Dr.Rivers, Robert Ross, and Robert Graves. I have also begun a better appreciation of poetry in general. Ms.Wilson writes on the assumption that her readers have knowledge of the technical aspects of poetry which I definitely lack. But she can be forgiven that. I am looking forward to reading Sassoon's memoirs and fiction. I will definitely read other installments of this fascinating biography.