fran brearton
affinity here is not so much ‘we poets’ as it is ‘we soldiers’ in trying times, the tone
evocativeof Sassoon’s profoundly sentimental feelings towards his men.
Of course, neither account is entirely to be trusted, although there are some
consistencies between the late 1920s memoirs and the relevant letters and diary
entries from the wartime period, since both versions are coloured by the experiences
of the 1920s. In addition, both poets have been the subject of several biographies
which illuminate, from different angles, a peculiarly fraught relationship, in a detail
which needs no reiteration here. Similarly,Adrian Caesar’s work sheds considerable
light on some of the sexual tensions at work between the two.^9 But Sassoon chose, in
later years, to reorientate his perceptions of a network of poetic and personal rela-
tions—gradually placing Owen centre-stage—and critical responses have tended
to follow him in devoting attention primarily to the Sassoon-Owen axis.^10 Robert
Graves is entirely written out of Sassoon’s second Great War memoir from 1945,
Siegfried’s Journey, a non-fictionalized (and yet, through such omissions, entirely
fictionalized) account of the period from 1916 to 1920. (In a thought-provoking par-
allel, Graves reacts similarly to Laura Riding, who is written out of the 1957 edition
ofGoodbye to All That, whilst Sassoon remains a central figure.) Hence also, perhaps,
Graves’s marginalized and simplified representation in a work such asRegeneration.
But this is not the picture which emerges at the time, or from the poetry.
On one level, then, the relationship is personal, and the closeness of the friendship
is probably unique among the soldier-poets of the Great War. In a letter to Sassoon
in 1933, Graves talks of ‘imagining back to a time when I knew and liked you—loved
you was more like it’.^11 Yet it is much more than personal, given the extent to
which they were entangled with each other’swriting: Graves proposed revisions to
Sassoon’s ‘To Any Dead Officer’; Sassoon did some editing ofGoliath and David;
they both convalesced at Harlech in the autumn of 1916, working on getting new
collections in order.^12 More importantly, evident in Graves’s letters from 1917 is
his sense that he, Sassoon, Robert Nichols, and, ‘when we’ve educated him a trifle
more’,^13 Wilfred Owen, are the four who will transform English poetry in the
future: ‘we have lit such a candle as by God’s grace will set the whole barn alight’.^14
Literary history does not now tend to tell it that way, inasmuch as Eliot and
Pound have a greater claim to have ‘set the whole barn alight’ and revolutionized
(^9) To what extent the friendship was tinged with a homoerotic element remains a moot point,
although it seems clear that Sassoon’s feelings, and probably also Graves’s, were feelings of love to
a degree unusual even in the close male bonding found in trench life. For a fuller discussion of
these issues, see Caesar’s study,Taking It Like a Man. Graves has so far been the subject of three
biographies—by Martin Seymour-Smith, Richard Perceval Graves, and Miranda Seymour. See also
biographies of Sassoon by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, John Stuart Roberts, and Max Egremont.
(^10) See e.g. Arthur E. Lane,An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried
Sassoon 11 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972).
12 Graves to Siegfried Sassoon, n.d. [Sept. 1933],In Broken Images, 228.
SeeIn Broken Images, 60, 66, 71.^13 Graves to Edward Marsh, 29 Dec. 1917, ibid. 90.
(^14) Graves to Robert Nichols, n.d. [Nov. 1917], ibid. 89.