From Soldier-Poet to Veteran Memoirist: Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, and the Limits of Life-Writing in Prose

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent Great War-writer. Critics have nevertheless reached no consensus as to whether these lightly fictionalised “memoirs” represent true accounts of Sherston’s/ Sassoon’s war or fictional constructions. They have also yet to account for the differences between the Memoirs and Sassoon’s war-poetry, and between Sherston’s stated commemorative goals and his complete account. This article dissects the Memoirs’ adaptation of Sassoon’s front-line poetics of commemoration: it reads their new application of this poetics via his compositional difficulties, his dependence upon his own wartime writings, and life-writing’s uneasy relationship to truth. As I show, Sherston has more in common with his author than Sassoon intended, but differences remain; still, his memoirs have as much right to that appellation as any other text in the language.

Shell-Shocked Walt Whitmans

Chapter 2 begins with a dinner party at which W.B. and George Yeats, Richard Aldington, and Brigit Patmore were present. Closely reading Aldington’s poetry as well as his novel, Death of a Hero (much of which was written in Rapallo), this chapter considers Yeats’s attitude to the postwar poets whom he derided as “shell-shocked Walt Whitmans.” The chapter also looks at connections between Aldington’s poem The Eaten Heart and Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, and their surprising relationship to W.B. Yeats’s poem “Parnell’s Funeral.” The chapter concludes with Yeats’s address of “war poetry” in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and his inclusion there of another of Rapallo’s visitors: Siegfried Sassoon.

Il nazionalismo della letteratura britannica prima della Grande Guerra e l’esperienza dei War Poets

L’immagine di un Regno Unito visto come Eden inconsapevole della tragedia che sta per lacerarlo è diffusa, ma piuttosto falsa. L’apparente serenità nasconde una violenza latente e gravi questioni interne e la guerra, quindi, non fa altro che accelerare un processo già in atto. Di tutta la letteratura inglese del Ventesimo secolo, la poesia di guerra sembra, sotto molti punti di vista, una “parentesi” all’interno del panorama letterario. La war poetry è il prodotto di un determinato periodo storico, sociale e culturale venutosi a formare nella Prima guerra mondiale. Tra i migliori poeti della Grande Guerra troviamo Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen e Siegfried Sassoon. Il fatto che molti poeti siano ufficiali – ma non alti ufficiali – permette loro di essere in contatto, a livello socio-culturale, con i ranghi elevati dell’esercito e, fisicamente, con i soldati semplici. In questo modo hanno una visione più ampia della realtà in trincea.