How the Bond Between Two Gay Men Produced Some of the Finest Poems of World War I
Photo by George Charles Beresford/Wikimedia Commons and Unknown/Wikimedia Commons.
The warrior-poets were among the most significant chroniclers of World War I. “If I should die, think only this of me;/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England” and “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row” are lines that live on in the popular imagination, 100 years after the outbreak of hostilities.
But many of the finest poems of the Great War—including “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est”—might not exist were it not for the pivotal bond between two gay men who were the era’s finest war poets: Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Sassoon, the older of the pair, enlisted in August 1914. He served on the Western Front with the poet Robert Graves and “gentle soldier” David Cuthbert Thomas, with whom he had a relationship while Sassoon was studying at Clare College, Cambridge. In March 1916, Thomas was shot through the throat and died. Sassoon wrote two poems in his memory, “A Letter Home” and “The Last Meeting,” the latter of which speaks of the affection Sassoon evidently felt for Thomas:
I called him, once; then listened: nothing moved:
Only my thumping heart beat out the time.
Whispering his name, I groped from room to room.
Quite empty was that house; it could not hold
His human ghost, remembered in the love
That strove in vain to be companioned still.
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