A Study Guide for Siegfried Sassoon's "Blighters"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Siegfried Sassoon's "Blighters," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535819633

Book preview

08

Blighters

Siegfried Sassoon

1917

Introduction

Until 1914, young Siegfried Sassoon, a wealthy English gentleman, spent his days fox hunting and playing sports. He was also a poet, albeit a minor one, of the Georgian school, a group of poets dedicated to infusing English poetry with the beauty of nature. All this changed when Europe exploded into war in August of 1914. The rest of Sassoon's long life would be spent coming to terms with his experiences fighting in the trenches of the Western Front as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers from 1915 to 1918. A courageous war hero who rescued his men from certain death on the field, Sassoon also protested the war and risked court-martial.

‘Blighters,’ published in 1917 as a part of the collection The Old Huntsman and Other Poems is an excellent example of Sassoon's talent for satiric, confrontational poetry, and is still in print in many collections of Sassoon's poetry, including The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, reprinted by Echo Press in 2006. Written in response to a revue at the Liverpool Hippodrome, which Sassoon attended in January, 1917, ‘Blighters’ attacks the civilians at home in England, the blighters of the title, for their ill-founded, excessive, and shallow patriotism. Their lack of understanding of the reality of war and of the conditions in the trenches elicits hatred in the narrator of the poem.

Author Biography

Siegfried Sassoon was born on September 8, 1886, to the wealthy family of Alfred Ezra Sassoon and Theresa Georgiana Thornycroft Sassoon near Warminster, Kent, England. Alfred Sassoon's family were Sephardic Jews who had historically established a large merchant business, extending from Baghdad to Bombay through Europe. Theresa Thornycroft was from a wealthy country family, many of whom were sculptors, including her uncle and mother. She was eight years older than Alfred Sassoon, and she was a Christian, making her doubly unsuitable in the eyes of Alfred's family. The couple married secretly in 1884 without the approval of the Sassoon family, and chose to live in the country near the Thornycrofts.

Siegfried was the second of three sons born to Alfred and Theresa.