Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, A Biography (1918-1967)

Rating:
Summary: An Enlightening Life of a Minor Poet
Review: What makes some poets great and leaves others to become forgotten by history? To be fair, you can't call Siegfried Sassoon forgotten, since Jean Moorcroft Wilson has spent twelve years or more researching every known fact of his life. And because he lived into the era of VietNam and the "summer of love," an astonishing number of people who are still alive remember him. She has done a wonderful job combing through his papers and coming up with real, solid evidence about the facts of his life, the emotional, sexual and aesthetic complexities of the man.

And yet at the same time, one thinks that she is making slightly a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to her failed attempt to build him up as a writer of permanent interest. Sassoon interested the generation of Georgians who followed the dictates of taste that Edward Marsh laid down, yet at the very moment of his ascension, a counter-revolution in taste, fomented by the American poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and their Irish colleague W. B. Yeats, were spreading modernism all over the critical map. And even though modernism has lost its iron grip over the popular imagination, the tide has not turned back to the days when a versifier like Sassoon is once again on top of the heap. He was talented, he was tormented, he went to bed with the handsomest men in the world, but his writing isn't all that. Too bad. Still, the book is a fine one and will give you a wonderful sense of period detail--of several periods--in British history since World War I.