Jewels in Her Crown: Treasures of Columbia University Libraries Special Collections

206.  Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967).  Notes and rough drafts. Autograph manuscript, 77 pages, 1906. RBML, Siegfried Sassoon Papers

Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden were the surviving British poets of World War I, among the much longer list of those, such as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, who were killed. In addition to the manuscript drafts and typescripts of two volumes of Sassoon's autobiography, The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938) and The Weald of Youth (1942), Columbia owns thirteen volumes of his early notebooks. These contain drafts of over two hundred poems for the period 1894 until 1909, from age eight to twenty-two. This volume contains four of the poems that appeared in his first book, Poems, 1906.