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Chapter 4 examines how Siegfried Sassoon’s deeply entrenched divided self formally and thematically shapes his autobiographical trilogy as a poet’s journey from Romanticism to Modernism. The second prose trilogy by Sassoon is ‘the story of my effort to become a famous poet’. Although more explicitly Wordsworthian than James, Sassoon’s final undercutting of the Künstlerroman form in his so-called ‘straight autobiography’ is also more drastic, revealing the impact of war on artistic identity. The chapter discusses Sassoon’s self-theorising throughout the texts and his desire to write himself into something more than a soldier poet, which these texts achieve with ease. The chapter concludes that much like poetry, the structure of the text embodies equal meaning to the words, so that Sassoon’s ‘factual’ prose works invite literary interpretation and even poetic comparisons.

Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like Muirhead Bone and war poets like Rupert Brooke, this chapter argues that most urgent task confronting the military authorities was to bridge the gulf between the commanding strategic perspective and the collapses of vision in the trench labyrinth of the Western Front. It explores how despite its notorious failures the war machine used propaganda, censorship, military discipline, camouflage and other new technologies to recapture the oversight of battle, turning the imperial sovereign gaze on the minds and bodies of the mass army in the trenches. Despite antimodernism on the home front, the military authorities covertly cannibalized modernist culture in their struggle to modernize. But the camouflaged modernism of Rosenberg, Vera Brittain, or Ford's Parade's End demonstrates a more sceptical response to the dominant perspective of war.

This chapter introduces Siegfried Sassoon and his selective approach to the past, looking at his literary responses to each world war by studying his poetry and prose from the 1920s to the 1940s. It studies the role of nostalgia in his representation of his survival of war, how nostalgia is used as a way to filter the memories of the past, and nostalgia in Georgian and modernist poetry.

This chapter explores the function of sleep habits and insomnia in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, arguing that insomnia is an embodiment of the individual's resistance to military discipline, loss of privacy, and the subjection of one's body to authoritative control. Insomnia, a liminal state between sleeping and waking, pits the body against the mind or mind against the body, and in doing so illustrates the failure of disciplinary mechanisms to completely regulate individual behaviours. Further, the phenomenology of insomnia is in many ways similar to the phenomenology of experience in the First World War, especially given the war's association with exhaustion and fatigue, nocturnal activity, a sense of endlessness, and idiosyncratic temporality, making it an apt device through which to express the anxieties associated with participation in the war.

This chapter discusses Mansfield's return to London in April 1918, her marriage to Murry, and their adversarial relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell and others associated with Bloomsbury that resulted from Murry's negative review of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. It considers the change in these relations when Murry took over the editorship of the Athenaeum in 1919, especially the cautious friendship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, and the professional competition between Murry and T. S. Eliot.

Robert Graves’s war poems use an ironic distancing effect that distinguishes him within the long tradition of war poets from Homer, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, Archilochus, Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil to the soldier poets of World War I. Graves’s rhetorical stance is linked to symptoms of post-traumatic stress developing in his childhood and intensified by his near-death wounding in World War I. Graves writes war poems in the clear, spare, and low-toned style of other soldiers and veterans like Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell. But he rarely forces readers to take in emotionally intense scenes, because he believes that those unbaptized in the suicidal sacrament of war cannot understand its realities. Graves’s cynicism about the capacities of power figures even to see the truth underlies the intellectualized satire in his translation of Homer’s Iliad and his poem about the Battle of Marathon, ‘The Persian Version’.