Hodgson left Japan for good in 1938 and returned to the UK to visit friends. He went to visit Sassoon and Hester at Heytesbury House in August of that year and stayed for two weeks. He then left to finally settle in Ohio, USA.

Sassoon admired Hodgson’s poems ‘The Bull’ and ‘The Song of Honour,’ and had wanted to meet him since 1914. Sassoon thought Hodgson might be able to resolve the internal conflict he was experiencing between the sporting ‘fox-hunting man’ and the poet. A brilliant (and prolific) talker, Hodgson seemed to Sassoon to be a ‘prodigious genius’ and the strongest of the Georgian Poets. However, Jean Moorcroft Wilson states that “after ‘The Song of Honour’ in 1913, Hodgson didn’t produce another work of substance until ‘The Muse and the Mastiff’ in 1942, and even that was a disappointment to some of his greatest admirers, though not to Sassoon.”

When Sassoon moved to Fitz House in Teffont Magna in November 1931, Hodgson was one of his first guests. Hodgson had written to Sassoon praising his collection ‘The Heart’s Journey,’ and he  also wrote in 1938 regarding the book Sassoon was writing ‘The Old Century and Seven More Years’ stating, “You don’t know how good it is. It’s nature (human) with a pen. I hope it’s going to be of great length…”