Siegfried Sassoon

by Max Egremont

"Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing poetry as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility." "By 1918 Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things (who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh). In 1933, upon the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty a