SOURCE: "The Three Roles of Siegfried Sassoon," in TSE: Tulane Studies in English, Vol. VII, 1957, pp. 169-85.

Here, Cohen outlines the three roles that he believes Sassoon has assumed in regard to his poetry, those of "country gentleman," "angry prophet," and "self-effacing hermit. "

In his conclusion to the Cambridge University Clark Lectures, Robert Graves, while naming the modern writers he considered to be in the "small, clear stream of living" poetry, said he found it "remarkable that the extraordinary five years of Siegfried Sassoon's poetic efflorescence (1917-21) should be utterly forgotten now." At a time when Graves' own autobiography of his wartime experiences, Goodbye To All That, has been reissued, along with Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War and Wilfred Owen's Poems, it is indeed remarkable that Sassoon's poetic achievement during the Great War is now forgotten, and even more remarkable that Sassoon, who has published his poems in...