In May 1911 Sassoon went again to Oxford and stayed with Forbes. They made a sentimental journey to Marlborough and, no doubt, exchanged confidences, with Sassoon expressing gratitude for the introduction to Carpenter’s work. Whether Forbes urged him to contact Carpenter is not clear but on 11 July a letter went to him from Weirleigh:
Dear Edward Carpenter,
… It was not until October last year, when I was just 24, that, by an accident, I read your Intermediate Sex, and have since read Towards Democracy and Who shall command the heart? I am afraid I have not studied socialism sufficiently to be in sympathy with what I know of it; but your words have shown me all that I was blind to before, and have opened up the new life for me, after a time of great perplexity and unhappiness. Until I read The Intermediate Sex, I knew absolutely nothing of that subject, (and was entirely unspotted, as I am now), but life was an empty thing, and what idea I had about homosexuality was absolutely prejudiced, and I was in such a groove that I couldn’t allow myself to be what I wished to be, and the intense attraction I felt for my own sex was almost a subconscious thing and my antipathy for women a mystery to me. It was only by chance that I found my brother (a year younger) was exactly the same. I cannot say what it has done for me. I am a different being and have a definite aim in life and something to lean on, though of course the misunderstanding and injustice is a bitter agony sometimes. But having found out all about it, I am old enough to realise the better and nobler way, and to avoid the mire which might have snared me had I known 5 years ago. I write to you as the leader and the prophet.
The note of effusive thanks and admiration is followed by some details of Sassoon’s life in the country, his love of music, commitment to poetry. He then, probably out of deference to Carpenter’s Socialism, distances himself from the ‘plutocratic’ Sassoons and follows this with a quite extraordinary reference to his father who, he tells Carpenter, ‘was intensely musical and I think had a strong vein of the homosexual nature in him’. Did Sassoon believe that showing intensity in the arts was a sign of homosexuality? What we know of Alfred Sassoon leaves little doubt that he bore no sexual antipathy to women. The letter ends with Sassoon in unctuous mood: ‘May your reward be in the generations to come, as I pray mine may be. I am not religious but I try to believe that our immortality is to be, (in those immortals whom our better lives may lead to, and whose immortal ways are marred and kept back by the grossness of unworthy souls). I take as my watchword those words of yours – strength to perform and pride to suffer without sign.’
Carpenter must have worked hard to get any meaning from those florid final sentences, but he wrote appreciatively of the sonnets Sassoon had enclosed. Writing to him on 2 August, Sassoon suggested he might travel north to meet Carpenter, but in the event he stayed at Weirleigh and revised his poetry.
In November he sent a copy of the revised sonnets to Edmund Gosse and received, some three weeks later, a reply which opened on a note of encouragement and ended with a word of advice:
You show a firm advance beyond all verse of yours which I had previously read. You have the sonnet-spirit and something of the sonnet-touch. The picturesqueness of ‘Autumn’ and the tender melancholy of ‘Evening in the Mountains’ leave nothing to be desired. They achieve a rare beauty. You must, however, be careful to resist a mere misty or foggy allusiveness. The danger which lies before the poet who endeavours in a sonnet to capture one of those volatile and capricious moods of emotion which are particularly fitted for the sonnet is to resign himself to its haziness. Your sonnets are not firmly enough drawn.
Gosse’s reply endorsed the advice Helen Wirgman had already given him in that summer of 1910, after she had read the revised work. Coming up to his study with the manuscript in hand, she said that this new edition was really no improvement on the original. In Gosse’s words it was all ‘haziness’. Wirgie described the weakness as a lack of physicality, of sharpness and definition:
Wirgie had given me the clue that I needed, though I was unconscious of it at the time. She meant, as I now see it, that the feeling I put into my poetry was derived from delight in word-music and not from observation and experience of what I wrote about. She saw that my verbal imagery was becoming exclusively literary, while the opportunity for writing poetry was waiting for me all the time, as it were, in that view across the Weald from our garden. The vaguely instinctive nature-worship which I had sometimes tried to put into words needed to be expressed in a definite form.
Reading those poems now is to confirm Gosse’s and Wirgie’s assessment, and the poems which followed show the same deficiencies. Sassoon was slow learning the lesson and even slower in applying the advice. He continued, however, to be published in The Academy and in the more highly regarded Westminster Gazette, achieving 11 poems in print in 1911. In that same year, having revised many of the 1909 sonnets, and with some new additions, he ordered another private edition entitled Twelve Sonnets.
But his assiduity in working and re-working his verses and adding to their number did not find reward in solving the problem of the lack of concreteness. He remained sure of his vocation. Gosse continued to receive the fruits of Sassoon’s endeavours and encouraged him to go on writing, despite the seemingly intractable nature of the problem, though Gosse’s last sentence may suggest he was running out of kind things to say: ‘I see progress. Try your hand at some objective theme. You must not spend all your life among moonbeams and half-tones. Better than all the listening to advice – go on writing hard and reading the old masters.’ That letter from Gosse, dated 30 June 1912, came in response to Sassoon’s latest effort entitled Melodies, a collection of 15 poems. It is difficult to see where exactly is the progress mentioned by Gosse. The Swinburnian inscription:
The silence thrills with the whisper of secret streams
That well from the heart of the woodland
sounds a warning note that what follows is still fanciful, disconnected and, as one observer noted of his earlier efforts, ‘musical, grandiloquent and mindless’.
He was doing much better at cricket for his club, the Blue Mantles. His golf was also coming along, although here, as in his poetry, a lack of technique marred the possibilities of a good round. Theresa’s busy social activity and the flow of guests through Weirleigh filled the summer. Autumn and winter brought the point-to-point and hunting, with time to enjoy the Harbords’ liveliness at Colwood Park, the company of Norman Loder, country-house parties and dances. Here was the seemingly immutable rural England of cricket on the village green, church on Sunday, the cottage-garden, country lanes along which Sassoon would walk and enjoy his ‘localised existence’, where as he admits, the great affairs of the world seemed hardly to intrude. It was a world he evoked in later years, a partial world, romantic, sentimental and deeply loved.
There arose, however, doubts in Sassoon’s mind about this rural existence and its value to him as an aspiring poet: ‘Although I had always regarded the writing of poetry as a thing which needed to be kept to oneself, I now began to feel that it would be to my advantage if I were a little less remote from the literary world. I often wished that I could make friends with some other poets, but I never seemed to get any nearer to