Biography of siegfried sassoon

He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I. He helped to discover another war poet, Wilfried Owen, and later won acclaim for his prose work.

Siegfried sassoon family

Unlike many of the poets who had memorialized the great achievements of the British Empire in their war poetry, Sassoon addressed the human dimension, the cost of war to the combatants in both physical and more profound, psychological torment. In poems such as "Suicide in the Trenches," Sassoon presents the anguish of combat from the soldier's perspective.

The "War to End All Wars" was a gruesome affair, and the sense of the glory of war was replaced by a growing sense of despair, as many thousands of combatants gave their lives for, literally, a few square yards of territory. The sense of optimism of the Progressive era disappeared, giving way to a general malaise. Sassoon was born in a house named Weirleigh which still stands in the village of Matfield, Kent, to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother.

His father, Alfred, one of the wealthy Indian Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family, was disinherited for marrying outside the faith. His mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London —her brother was Sir Hamo Thornycroft. There was no German ancestry in Sassoon's family; he owed his unusual first name to his mother's predilection for the operas of Wagner.

His middle name was taken from the surname of a clergyman with whom she was friendly. Sassoon was educated at The New Beacon Preparatory School, Kent, Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and at Clare College, Cambridge, of which he was made an honorary fellow in , where he studied both law and history from to