Sassoon, Siegfried Loraine

English poet. His anti-war poems which appeared in The Old Huntsman (1917), Counter-Attack (1918), and later volumes, were begun in the trenches during World War I and express the disillusionment of his generation. His later poetry tended towards the reflective and the spiritual. His three fictionalized autobiographical studies, including Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston's Progress (1936), were published together as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (1937).

Educated at Cambridge, Sassoon enlisted in the army in 1915, serving in France and Palestine. Decorated and then wounded in France, he published a manifesto severely criticizing the authorities, ‘A Soldier's Declaration’ (1917). He was diagnosed as suffering from shell-shock and returned to duty.

He wrote volumes of genuine autobiography, The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried's Journey (1945). He also wrote a biography of the novelist George Meredith (1948) and Collected Poems 1908–1956 (second edition) was published in 1961.