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 have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be wrong and unjust.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, LGBTQ+ Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Rupert Chawner Brooke was born on 3 August 1887 at 5 Hillmorton Road, Rugby, Warwickshire, into a family for whom learning, public service, religion, and the traditions of English education were central facts of life. He died on 23 April 1915, aged only twenty-seven, on the Greek island of Skyros while serving with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. In the short interval between those dates, Brooke became…
“Love is the great poet of the world.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Spirituality
