Sassoon, Siegfried Loraine

(1886-1967)

   Born in Kent, the son of a Jewish father and Anglican mother, he was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge University. He served in France in World War I and won the Military Cross for his part in the Battle of the Somme; he later threw his medal into the River Mersey. His public denunciation of the futility of war brought him into conflict with the authorities and he was admitted to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, suffering from shellshock, and invalided out in 1918. He was appointed Commander of the British Empire in 1951 and was awarded the Queen's medal for poetry (1957) and honorary doctor of literature at Oxford (1965). Between his first volume of poetry, the Daffodil Murderer (1913), and his last, Collected Poems 1908-1956 (1961), he published twenty-one other volumes. He died at Heytesbury (Wiltshire) and was buried in Mells churchyard, Somerset, and memorialized by a stone in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey along with other poets of the First World War. Some of his poems: "An Absentee," "At the Cenotaph," "Battalion-Relief," "Christ and the Soldier," "Farewell to Youth," "The English Spirit," "Vigils."

   Sources: Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America. 5th edition. Gerald DeWitt Sanders, and John Herbert Nelson, eds., Macmillan, 1970. Collected Poems: 1908-1956 of Siegfried Sassoon. Faber and Faber, 1984. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition, 1.1. Encyclopædia Britannica. Electronic Edition, 2006. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. Obituary of Siegfried Sassoon. The Times, September 4, 1967. Poems That Live Forever. Hazel Felleman, ed. Doubleday, 1965. The Book of a Thousand Poems: A Family Treasury. J. Murray Macbain, ed. Peter Bedrick Books, 1983. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Norton Antholog y of Poetry. 4th ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stal, eds. W.W. Norton, 1996. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Westminster Abbey Official Guide (no date). Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).