SOURCE: "Achievement," in Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study, Universitaire pers Leiden, 1966, pp. 253-59.

In the following excerpt, Thorpe assesses Sassoon's accomplishments, commenting on the poet's role as an innovative writer of protest verse, his similarity to a number of past writers, and the religious content of his later works.

There is no universally accepted sliding-scale of values by which a writer's achievement may be measured. According to one viewpoint, a writer's stature is virtually determined by the extent to which he endeavours to grapple with and reconstruct the disordered world, material and intellectual, of the particular fragment of time in which he happens to have been born; according to another, it may be important that he has refused to touch the broken images of the present, but has instead explored the ramifications of the microcosmic self; yet a third—most exacting—viewpoint will demand that the search for...