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.