Siegfried Sassoon

Abstract

Robert Graves has indicated in Goodbye to All That (1929) that Sassoon’s first poems about the war were not in opposition to it:

At this time I was getting my first book of poems, Over the Brazier, ready…. I had one or two drafts in my pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried. He frowned and said that war should not be written about in such a realistic way. In return, he showed me some of his own poems. One of them (‘To Victory’) began

Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,

Not in the woeful crimson of men slain….

Siegfried had not yet been in the trenches. I told him, in my old-soldier manner, that he would soon change his style.