Siegfried Sassoon
Infogrid Pacific
Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems of the First World War, which brought him public and critical acclaim.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family, sometimes called the "Rothschilds of the East" because the family fortune was made in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country gentleman before the First World War, pursuing his two major interests, poetry and fox hunting. His early work, which was privately printed in several slim volumes between 1906 and 1916, is considered minor and imitative, heavily influenced by John Masefield (of whose work The Daffodil Murderer is a parody).