Siegfried Sassoon
Personal Information
Description
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC was an English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, culminating in his admission to a military psychiatric hospital; this resulted in his forming a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy". - Wikipedia
Books
Selected poems
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
Siegfried Sassoon is a famous WW 1 poet. This is his first effort of writin prose. It is a fictional "autobiography"!
The weald of youth
The author's memories of the years between 1909 and 1914.
The memoirs of George Sherston
Sassoon's fictionalized autobiography of his experiences in the trenches during World War I.
Sherston's progress
The capstone of Siegfried Sassoon's masterful George Sherston trilogy, Sherston's Progress, opens with Sherston under the care of neurologist Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, who allows the shell-shocked soldier to sort through his "futile demons" regarding the war still raging around him. After six months convalescing, Sherston rejoins his regiment before being dispatched to Ireland - where he attempts to reclaim some of the bucolic sense of his youth - then on to Palestine. He survives a gunshot to the head when back on the Western Front in France and ends up again with Rivers, who attempts to help Sherston journey through the aftereffects of war's particular horrors toward the beginning of a new life.
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
"A highly decorated English soldier and an acclaimed poet and novelist, Siegfried Sassoon won fame for his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographies that wonderfully capture the vanishing idylls of Edwardian England and the brutal realities of war. The second volume of Siegfried Sassoon's semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy picks up shortly after Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man: in 1916, with the young Sherston deep in the trenches of WWI. For his decoratged bravery, and also his harmful recklessness, he is soon sent to the Fourth Army School for officer training, then dispatched to Morlancourt, a raid, and on through the Somme. After being wounded by a bullet through the lung, he returns home to convalesce, where his questioning of the war and the British Military establishment leads him to write a public anti-war letter (verbatim the letter Sassoon wrote in 1917, entitled "Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration", which was eventually read in the British House of Commons). Through the help of close friend David Cromlech (based on Sassoon's friend Robert Graves) a medical board decides not to prosecute, but instead deem him to be mentally ill, suffering from shell-shock, and sends him to a hospital for treatment. Sassooon's stunning portrayal of a mind coming to terms with the brutal truths he has encountered in war - as well as his unsentimental, though often poetic, portrayal of class-defined life in England at wartime - is amongst the greatest books ever written about World War I, or war itself." --from book description, Amazon.com.