fran brearton
World War, Sassoon and Graves fought a rather different battle with each other
aboutdevelopments in modern poetry. Many of their overt arguments concern
factuality, sexuality, and money—all deemed private matters; yet those arguments
submerge within them a running debate about poetic form, literary modernism,
and, in Graves’s phrase, ‘the use or function of poetry’.^5
Graves’s account, inGoodbye to All That(1929), of his first meeting with Sassoon
is as follows:
I went to visit C Company where a Third Battalion officer whom I knew was commanding.
The C’s greeted me in a friendly way. As we were talking I noticed a book lying on the table.
It was the first book (except my Keats and Blake) that I had seen since I came to France that
was not either a military text-book or a rubbish novel. It was theEssays of Lionel Johnson.
When I had a chance I stole a look at the fly-leaf, and the name was Siegfried Sassoon. I
looked round to see who could possibly be called Siegfried Sassoon and bringLionel Johnson
with him to the First Battalion. He was obvious, so I got into conversation with him, and a
few minutes later we were walking to B ́ethune, being off duty until that night, and talking
about poetry. Siegfried had, at the time, published nothing except a few privately-printed
pastoral pieces of eighteen-ninetyish flavour and a satire on Masefield which, about half-way
through, had forgotten to be a satire and was rather good Masefield....At this time I was
getting my first book of poems,Over the Brazier, ready for the press; I had one or two drafts
in my pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried. He told me that they were too realistic
and that war should not be written about in a realistic way. In return he showed me some
of his own poems. One of them began:
Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,
Notinthewoefulcrimsonofmenslain...This was before Siegfried had been in the trenches. I told him, in my old-soldier manner,
that he would soon change his style.^6
Typically, this account is both a mythologizing of the encounter and a demytho-
logizing of perceptions of the war poets consequent, in part, on the posthumous
publication in 1920 of Wilfred Owen’sPoems(an edition introduced by Sassoon). In
Graves’s staging of the event, Graves is the young generation Romantic (Keats and
Blake), Sassoon the languorous 1890s romantic parody (Johnson). Yet the genera-
tion roles are also reversed: Sassoon’s privately printed verse presents him as lagging
behind the younger poet’s accepted-for-publication status. Graves deliberately
reminds us of two further things: first, and correctly, that his own war experience
outstripped that of any other soldier-poet (Sassoon’s being, by comparison, rel-
atively limited); second, that the now well-known story of Sassoon precipitating
Owen into his ‘realistic’ anti-war mode during their months at Craiglockhart in
1917 has, as far as Graves is concerned, an earlier chapter—the story of his own
similar role as regards Sassoon in 1915–16. As with most of his autobiographical
(^5) Graves,White Goddess, 10.
(^6) Graves,Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography(London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 224.