A selective list of online literary criticism for the British war poet Siegfried Sassoon, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Sites
main page | 20th-century poetry | 20th-century literature | poetry of WWI
Born, Daniel. "Call to arms." The reviewer notes, "Conventional wisdom holds that a select group of World War I poets and writers, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen among them, forever changed the way we see war. In The Great War and Modern Memory (1976) historian and literary critic Paul Fussell argued that these groundbreaking writers transformed our perception of warfare from a heroic enterprise for brave soldiers to a disillusioning spectacle of waste in which youth are butchered by new and terrible technologies of death....Allen J. Frantzen directly challenges Fussell's perspective, or at least offers a strong corrective to it." Christian Century, August 24, 2004
Egremont, Max. A review of Siegfried Sassoon: A Life, "In many quarters these days, Siegfried Sassoon is best known as one of the principals in Pat Barker’s exceptional 1992 novel Regeneration, about the real-life Sassoon’s treatment for shell shock." NY Times, 12/27/05. Another review, from the UK Independent, 10/23/05
Moore, L. Hugh. "Siegfried Sassoon and Georgian Realism." Contends that "While Sassoon's early verse is definitely Georgian, this tradition contained realistic tendencies that culminated in the directness, brutality, and honesty of his best war verses." Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Jan., 1969), pp. 199-209
Rand, Thomas. "Edith Sitwell as letter writer: Reading the letters to Siegfried Sassoon." Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 1995
An introduction to Siegfried Sassoon part of an Oxford University project on the poets of The Great War, at the Oxford Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature
A PBS web site on World War I, with a brief section on Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen
Introduction to Siegfried Sassoon from the BBC
A bibliography of Sassoon editions from a book collectors' site, Bookseller World
Manuscript holdings of Sassoon's poems at Cambridge Univ.
A virtual exhibition from the UK National Archives contains a discussion of Sassooon and his reaction to WWI (removed from http://www.pro.gov.uk/virtualmuseum/millennium/war/sassoon/sassoon_1.htm)
main page | 20th-century poetry | 20th-century literature | poetry of WWI
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