a war of friendship poetry in the post-war years. That said, given the sometimes negative perceptions of
Georgianismthattookoncurrencyinthe1920s,itisworthrememberingthatGraves
praised Sassoon’s poems for becoming ‘much freer and more Georgian’^15 —two
things more often treated as mutually exclusive. The aspiration to write, in Graves’s
phrase, ‘the New Poetry’ is evident in the verse letters written by Graves and Sassoon
in 1916; but also implicit in the poems are the reasons for their failure to do so—at
least in the collective sense of which Graves dreamed.
Sassoon’s ‘A Letter Home (To Robert Graves)’ was written at Flixecourt in May ́
- It contains those elements which made Sassoon, in the months that followed,
into the satirical protest poet, with its ‘Clockwork soldiers in a row’.^16 It serves also
to indicate what may be seen as stylistic weaknesses in Sassoon, with its tendency
towards the over-adjectival (‘web-hung woods’, ‘hornbeam alleys’, ‘glowworm
stars’) and its occasionally obtrusive rhyming couplets: ‘He’s come back, all mirth
and glory,|Like the prince in fairy story.|Winter called him far away;|Blossoms
bring him home with May.’ Sassoon’s penchant for perfect rhyming, either in
couplets or cross-rhyme quatrains, sometimes works to intensify a poem’s effect,
as in ‘The Kiss’, sometimes to lessen it. There are also moments here of what
Graves called the ‘eighteen-ninetyish’ Sassoon, moments which may incline a
reader to sympathy with the Imagists’ later objections to the forced syllabic and
metrical regularities of pre-war verse. In 1917, Graves outlined his ideal diction as
one in which the poet uses ‘common and simple words [and] make[s] the plain
words do the work of the coloured ones’: the poet, he writes, pre-empting Keith
Douglas’s later desire to make ‘every word work for its place in a line’,^17 should
strive towards ‘clarity of expression’, something which Sassoon, he implies, only
intermittently achieves.^18 An elegy for David Thomas, who had been killed in March
1916, Sassoon’s ‘A Letter Home’ is not a poem which bitterly refuses traditional
consolation, in a manner we have come to associate with the Owenesque Great War
protest elegy, but one which, as with many of Sassoon’s poems, indulges Marvellian
pastoral and seeks out Miltonic ‘pastures new’ for the dead:
Now he’s here again; I’ve seen
Soldier David dressed in green,
Standing in a wood that swings
Tothemadrigalhesings.Yet it is also a poem of aesthetic idealism, in a manner that we have come to
associate more with Graves the Muse poet than with Sassoon the protest poet—‘I
know|Dreams will triumph, though the dark|Scowls above me where I go’—and
(^15) Graves to Edward Marsh, 15 Mar. 1916, ibid. 44.
(^16) Siegfried Sassoon, ‘A Letter Home (To Robert Graves)’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956(London:
Faber, 1984), 37–9.
(^17) Keith Douglas to J. C. Hall, 10 Aug. 1943, inThe Letters, ed. Desmond Graham (Manchester:
Carcanet, 2000), 295. 18
Graves to Sassoon, 13 Sept. 1917, inIn Broken Images, 83.