| Biography Bibliography
Study Questions
WWI Trilogy
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| Sassoon, Siegfried -- (1886-1967) English poet and novelist |
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Educated at Cambridge, Sassoon enlisted in the army 1915, serving in France
and Palestine. An officer in World War I, he expressed his conviction of the brutality and
waste of war in grim, forceful, realistic verse--The Old Huntsman (1917), Counter-Attack
(1918), Satirical Poems (1926), Vigils (1935), Sequences (1957), and others. His
fictional, semiautobiographical trilogy--Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of
an Infantry Officer (1930), Sherston's
Progress (1936)--was collected as The Memoirs of George Sherston (1937). Sassoon also
wrote several autobiographical works--The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The
Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried's Journey (1945)--and a biography of George Meredith
(1948). |
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| Owen, Wilfred -- (1893-1918) English
soldier and poet |
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His verse, owing much to the encouragement of Siegfried Sassoon, is among the most moving of World War I poetry; it
shatters the illusion of the glory of war, revealing its hollowness and cruel destruction
of beauty. Only four poems were published during his lifetime; he was killed in action a
week before the Armistice. Sassoon posthumously collected and edited his Poems 1920. Among
the best known are 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', published 1921.
Benjamin Britten used several of the poems in his War Requiem 1962. Owen was born in Plas Wilmot, Oswestry,
Shropshire, and educated at Birkenhead Institute and London University. He went to France
1913 as a tutor, returning to England to enlist in the Artists' Rifles 1915; two years
later he was invalided home and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, where
Sassoon was his fellow patient. Sent back to France as a company commander, he won the MC,
but was killed in the crossing of the Sambre Canal.
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| Rivers, W. H. R. Dr. -- Neurologist & social
anthropologist |
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Rivers was
a physician who during the First World War had different ideas about shell shock than most
of the physicians of his time. Rather than treating these soldiers with electroshock
therapy, he preferred psychotherapy. his insights form the basis for a wider understanding
of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorders. Well-versed in Freudian theory,
Rivers maintained that war neuroses did not result from the war experiences themselves but
were "due to the attempt to banish from the mind distressing memories". He
attributed his own clinical successes mainly to encouraging patients to remember, but he
also described more subtle aspects of therapy, which he termed "re-education"
and "faith and suggestion", by which he meant the role of the therapist in
reframing painful memories and the power of the therapeutic relationship itself. Rivers travelled widely as a ship's surgeon and then as an anthropologist,
had diverse interests and friends, among them many leading writers, poets, and scientists,
and was recognised as a pivotal figure in England in the intellectual emergence of two new
disciplines: anthropology and psychology. He never married, lived a bachelor professor's
life at Cambridge, and died of a sudden illness in his early 50s.
The few historical facts that are known about his childhood offer
hints as to the nature of his psychological wounds. Both as a child and adult Rivers
stuttered, especially when speaking in public, and he had no visual memory. When Rivers
was a young boy, his father, a cleric, took over the speech therapy practice of his
deceased brother-in-law, James Hunt, later updating Hunt's definitive text, Stammering and
Stuttering, Their Nature and Treatment. Even Rivers' name seems to bear a stutter: W H R
Rivers, William Halse Rivers Rivers. |
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