Sigfried Sassoon: A Life

[PilgrimDuke]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/books/27mcgr.html

The link above is to a New York Times review of the subject book.

I'm not a Sassoon expert, but I thought that the following quote was interesting.

"He was a minor poet, a writer of misty, Rossetti-like verse, who briefly flared into greatness and then reverted to being minor again, without ever quite understanding what had happened to him."

[Guest mythago]

"He was a minor poet, a writer of misty, Rossetti-like verse, who briefly flared into greatness and then reverted to being minor again, without ever quite understanding what had happened to him."

Oh I love that! I think that sums him up perfectly. I've read some of his non-Great War poetry and it doesn't do anything for me at all, whereas the material he wrote during and about the war is very powerful. IMHO. I suspect this was because there was so much emotion behind it. His earlier and later material never stuck me like that.

Cas

[Fred van Woerkom]

Cas and Duke,

Something similar about Sassoon's poetic career had already been said by Bernhard Bergonzi in HEROES'TWILIGHT:

"As with other writers who narrowly survived the Great War, it was to remain Sassoon's one authentic subject; it, or the emotions stemming from it, inspired his best poems, and his admirable prose works. When Sassoon attempted to write straightforward poems on subjects remote from the war, he dwindled to the stature of a minor Georgian survival: the bulk of his later poetry, sententious or laxly pastoral, is carefully written and overpoweringly dull".

And when he writes, in 1940, some conventionally patriotic poems, the result has been called 'a dash of Winston Churchill in an ocean of water'.

But let's be grateful for the biting satire and anti-war propaganda of his later Great War poems.

All the best,

Fred