Today at Southfields Community College we held our A-level Easter revision sessions. It was great to feedback on students’ brilliant creative writing and push on with our preparations for the exams. Indeed, good luck to everyone who have their exams upcoming. Use the holidays wisely– but remember to find time to relax, too!
Before moving on from Sassoon in the anthology, I thought it might be useful to post a few links to resources about him on the web. And, if you want to refresh a little on Siegfried Sassoon ahead of the exams, then you’re in luck. Our friends at the BBC have archived a fascinating episode about Sassoon made for one of Radio Four’s best programmes, ‘In Our Time’. Three top Sassoon scholars and Melvyn Bragg discuss the man, his life, the war and his poetry. If you’re serious about success in a month and a half’s time, you really should make an effort to listen to this.
Radio Four isn’t the only audio resource for Sassoon you can listen to on the web. If you link to The Poetry Archive, you’ll find Sassoon reading ‘Everyone Sang’ and ‘The Dug Out’, in his expressive, cut-glass English accent.
Hop on from there over to the ever-useful First World War Poetry Digital Archive, where you can look through the Sassoon digital archive and find many of the original written drafts for Sassoon’s poetry. Read the excellent brief biography there, then search for any poem you’re interested in: if you’re interested in curiosities you can, for example, find ‘Glory of Women’ written on Craiglockheart War Hospital stationary. Moreover the website also has links to a number of useful sites that you can access, here.
Once done with Oxford you can then visit the competition at the Cambridge Library site, where you’ll find a series of pages dedicated to an old Sassoon exhibition, ‘Dream Voices: Siegfried Sassoon, memory and war’. The library purchased a collection of Sassoon’s journals in 2009, and this site contains a number of his drawings and handwritten drafts of poetry. Most interesting, I think, are the journals that agonise over justifications for the war: “I wish I could believe”, he writes, “that Ancient War History justifies the indefinite prolongation of the war… Our peace terms remain the same “the destruction of Kaiserism + Prussionism” – I don’t know what this destruction represents”. There are, however, also some rather more lighthearted pictures drawn by Sassoon as a ten year old that attest colourfully to the young boy’s love of hunting. All in all, some fascinating images.
Enjoy.
–and have a nice Easter holiday!
Move Him Into The Sun 