The making of a poet

I once considered attempting a biography of Siegfried Sassoon. Having now read Max Egremont’s comprehensive and perceptive book, based partly on access to private papers unavailable to previous biographers, I’m relieved I didn’t. Egremont has produced a thorough, sympathetic, balanced, engrossing account.

There are two aspects to the 1886-1967 life of Captain Siegfried Sassoon, MC (he liked to use his rank and was proud of his medal) that make him a worthy biographical subject. The first is his literary achievement, essentially his war poems and his prose memoirs. Although he felt he was a poet from the age of five, was published before the first world war and continued producing well into old age, it was really the inspiration of war that lifted him — as it has many writers throughout history — beyond the merely personal and gave him a subject that extended and fulfilled his poetic gift. His later prose memoirs vividly conveyed not only war but the period itself.

The second reason for his biographical importance is his effect on the history of that war — to be more precise, on the way the war has come to be popularly perceived. In so far as it is taught in schools now, and in its continuing allure as a subject of fictional re-creation, it has become a vehicle for vicarious protest by those who didn’t suffer it on behalf of those who did. Egremont, biographer of Major General Spears, is clearly well informed on the war and avoids contributing to what he aptly calls ‘the myth of avoidable slaughter’. His subject, how- ever, is a very significant, even a major, part of that myth. The combination of Sassoon’s poems and his 1917 public protest — ‘I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of other soldiers.