Siegfried Sassoon - The Poet Who Survived

In Our Time, presented by Melvyn Bragg (BBC Radio 4) discusses the life of First World War poet, Siegfried Sassoon.

In 1916 the Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for "conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches". The citation noted that he had braved "rifle and bomb fire" and that "owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in". The hero in question was the poet, Siegfried Sassoon. And yet a year later, and at great personal risk, Sassoon publicly denounced the conduct of the war in which he had fought so well.

A man of contradictions, Sassoon had a long and eventful life after surviving the trenches. It included a string of homosexual affairs, a failed marriage, a religious conversion and several tumultuous arguments with literary friends. And he continued to write poetry until his death, from cancer, in 1967.

But how significant a poet is Siegfried Sassoon, what version of Englishness did this half-Jewish, homosexual cricket lover invent for himself and how do you explain the mind of a man who bitterly opposed the First World War, yet fought in it with an almost insane ferocity?

Contributors

Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London and a biographer of Sassoon

Fran Brearton, Reader in English and Assistant Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at the University of Belfast

Max Egremont, a biographer of Siegfried Sassoon

The programme is available for download as an MP3 file here.
A bibliography and links about Sassoon can be found here.

Siegfried Sassoon - The Poet Who Survived