Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and
compassionate poems of the First World War, which brought him
public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and
jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and
brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized
generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and
blind support of the war. His later poems, often concerned with
religious themes, were less appreciated, but the
autobiographical trilogy The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston
won him two major awards. Born into a wealthy Jewish family,
sometimes called the "Rothschilds of the East" because the
family fortune was made in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely
life of a cultivated country gentleman before the First World
War, pursuing his two major interests, poetry and fox hunting.
His early work, which was privately printed in several slim
volumes between 1906 and 1916, is considered minor and
imitative, heavily influenced by John Masefield (of whose work
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