Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
Three autograph letters signed to J. A. Stark, Heytesbury and ‘Snowed Up House’, 5 October 1954 and 4 & 13 January 1955
3½ pages in total, 132 x 175mm, pencil notes by the recipient regarding The Tasking on one letter and some notes in ballpoint on the recto of another, with an inscribed copy of Lenten Illuminations (limited to 200 copies). Provenance: Sotheby's, 29 & 30 June 1982, lot 566.

‘As a thinker, I am a child compared with many a mind more informed and powerful than my own (though poets do sometimes hit on solutions by intuitive process – heaven knows how)’. The letters primarily concern his book of verse The Tasking, thanking Stark for his constructive criticisms, suggesting that his own weakness is in ideas and not technique, referring to particular points suggested by Stark, and giving sources for quotations contained within the book. Sassoon hopes that 'you won’t find the poems too melancholy in tone. If so, you must blame the being who catches the intimations from elsewhere. The pipe smoker sitting here now disclaims responsibility, & would much rather have written something frisky and diverting’; and he writes interestingly of his poetic apprenticeship, ‘my own experience in youth – & later – was, that one had to write a great deal of waste paper basket stuff in order to arrive at the lucky moments’, he sends news of his son’s scholarship to Cambridge ‘any success of his is Oxygen for me’; and on his own poetic voice ‘The odd thing is that although I write such old fashioned verse I am told that my voice is unmistakable, and like nobody else’s’. Sassoon also discusses a recent trip to Cambridge, a picture at the Fitzwilliam Museum and the sales of his Collected Poems.