The English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) wrote a group of dramatic, intense lyrics in reaction to the horrors of World War I. His six volumes of partly fictionalized memoirs are a detailed record of the sensibilities of his age.

Siegfried Sasson was born in Brenchley, Kent, on Sept. 8, 1886, and spent his childhood at the family home in Weirleigh, in the protected and somewhat rarefied atmosphere of a family near the center of the late Victorian and Edwardian literary and artistic world. He was formally educated at Marlborough School and at Clare College, Cambridge, and began publishing poems privately in 1906. However, Sassoon's distinctive voice was not heard until the publication of his war poems--in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-attack (1918). He was the first of the younger Georgian poets to react violently against sentimentally patriotic notions of the glories of war; these poems have an extraordinary vigor--a stridency of tone...