Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born on 8 September 1886 at Weirleigh, a house near the village of Matfield in Kent, and died on 1 September 1967 at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, a week before his eighty-first birthday. He remains one of the defining literary witnesses of the First World War: a poet whose plain speech, anger, technical control, and mordant irony broke through the patriotic consolations of his age. Yet…
“I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, LGBTQ+ Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Edward Thomas was born Philip Edward Thomas on 3 March 1878 at Lambeth in south London, and died on 9 April 1917 near Arras in France, aged thirty-nine. His name now evokes a particular kind of English poetry: quiet but unsettled, exact in its descriptions of paths, trains, weather, birds, woods, and country speech, yet charged with questions of loss, belonging, choice, and mortality. His poetic career lasted scarcel…
“I write poetry because I cannot help it.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
