1917 to 1919

1920 to 1929

1930 to 1939

1940 to 1949

1950 to 1959

1960 to 1967

Four Anthologies

The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language - Published in 1938 by Oxford Unversity Press. ‘Everyone Sang’.

An Anthology of Modern Verse 1900 - 1920 (School Edition) - Reprinted in 1965 by Methuen & Co. ‘A Concert Party’, ‘Everyone Sang’, ‘The Dug-Out’,

An Anthology of Modern Verse 1920 - 1940 (School Edition) - Reprinted in 1963 by Methuen & Co. ‘At the Grave of Henry Vaughan’, ‘In Me, Past, Present, Future Meet’.

A Book of Verse For Boys and Girls (Part II) - Published in 1937 by Oxford. ‘Everyone Sang’.

To be a collector of Sassoon related books you don’t have to search for rare and expensive items to build up a collection that can still tell an interesting story. Sassoon was published in so many anthologies in his lifetime that even his bibliographer, Geoffrey Keynes, was unable to compile an accurate record of them. In his bibliography, Keynes listed thirty-four books that Sassoon had made contributions to, yet I have found almost 150 and feel confident there must be many more. Then there are the periodicals, and although Keynes does list many more of these, again, he had no way of knowing the exact number and there will no doubt be many more than he has indexed.

I bought the four anthologies above on the same day, three were bought at a second-hand book shop for £1 each and the fourth in a charity shop for £3.50. Four books with contributions by Sassoon for £6.50 is surely a bargain, particularly as Keynes does not record any of them. There is something else here though that makes these otherwise ordinary books quite interesting. A lot of critics, both contemporaries of Sassoon and much later, have stated that the relevance and quality of his poetry ended at the same time as the First World War. However, we can see that Sassoon’s poems were still being classed as ‘modern’ in 1940.