of poetry -- usually Shelley, Masefield and Thomas
Hardy -- and last and chiefly -- but always with a rapid,
tumbling enunciation and a much-irked desperate air
filled with pain -- of soldiers. For the incubus of war
is on him so that his days are shot with anguish and
his nights with horror.

He is twenty-eight years old; was educated at Marl-
borough and Christchurch, Oxford; was a master of
fox-hounds and is a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusi-
liers. Thrice he has fought in France and once in
Palestine. Behind his name are set the letters M.C.
since he has won the Military Cross for an act of
valour which went near to securing him a higher
honour.

The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon divides itself into
two rough classes -- the idyllic and the satiric. War
has defiled one to produce the other. At heart Sieg-
fried Sassoon is an idealist.

Before the war he had hardly published a line. He
spent his summers in the company of books, at the
piano, on expeditions, and in playing tennis. During
winter he hunted. Hunting was a greater passion with
him than poetry. Much of his poetry celebrated the
loveliness of the field as seen by the huntsman in the
early morning light. But few probably guessed that
the youth known to excel in field sports excelled also
in poetry. For, in its way, this early poetry does excel.
It was characteristic of him that nearly every little
book he then wrote was privately printed. Poetry was

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