Early in December 1912, Sassoon’s eyes wandered along the rows of books in his Studio and he randomly selected a copy of The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield. Published in 1911, this long narrative poem was the first of its kind since Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. Its language was earthy and quite unlike the exalted expressions of High Victorian poetry. It created shock-waves with its realism and use of ‘common and vulgar expressions’. Writing of the poem in The Poetry Review on 12 January 1912, Arundel del Re stated: ‘Mr John Masefield is a revolutionary. His latest work is an assault upon cherished principles and venerable conventions. Its value lies not so much in sheer audacity, though this indeed had peculiar interest, as in the influence it may have on contemporary poets.’
Sassoon, who possessed a good ear for dialect, decided to amuse himself ‘by scribbling a few pages of parody’. The result of this whimsical exercise was radical:
Having rapidly resolved to impersonate a Sussex farmhand awaiting trial for accidental homicide of the barman of the village ale-house, I began his story in the crudest imitation of Masefield’s manner. After the first fifty lines, or so, I dropped the pretence that I was improvising an exuberant skit. While continuing to burlesque Masefield for all I was worth, I was really feeling what I wrote – and doing it not only with abundant delight but a sense of descriptive energy quite unlike anything I had experienced before. Never before had I been able to imbue commonplace details with warmth of poetic emotion. Wholly derivative from The Mercy though it remained, my narrative did at any rate express that rural Sussex which I had absorbed through following the Southdown hounds and associating with the supporters of the hunt. In other words I was at last doing what had been suggested by Wirgie in 1911 – writing physically. Far into the night I kept up my spate of productiveness, and next day I went on with unabated intensity. By the evening I had finished it. Reading it through again, I did not ask myself what use there could be in writing a poem so extravagantly unoriginal. Nothing mattered except the mental invigoration it had brought me. I felt that in the last twenty-four hours, I had found a new pair of poetic legs.’
The Daffodil Murderer, as the poem was subsequently named, relates the story of an altercation in a village pub. The narrator and his friend Ted are ejected after someone called Bill takes them by the scruff of the neck. They wait in hiding to give Bill his deserts:
Bill seem’d hours and hours a-comin’;
‘Home Bill Bailey,’ he was hummin’;
Kicking flints up with his toes,
Back from his evening’s work he goes –
I wonder now what Bill was thinking;
Belike ‘twas nowt, for he’d been drinking,
And blokes that stumble home from boosing,
They haven’t got no thoughts worth losing;
He pass’d me by, all strain’d and ready;
Thump went my heart, but I was steady;
I’d got the pluck as wants no bracing;
I tripp’d him up and kick’d his face in –
Bill blinked his eyes and gave a guggle,
And lay there stiff without a struggle;
‘Here, Ted,’ said I, ‘I’ve clumped ‘im fair,’ –
Looked round, but Ted, he wasn’t there.
Ted never had the guts to do it;
I done the job and got to rue it.
The style was a clear departure from the work he produced earlier that year, ‘An Ode for Music’:
Angels of God and multitudes of Heaven
And every servant of the soul’s aspiring,
Be with me now, while to your influence bending
I strive to gain the summits of desiring;
Grant me in music’s name
Your symphonies of flame.
Sassoon was not inhibited by the obvious disparity in styles and sent both poems to T. W. H. Crosland, who had moved from The Academy and then the Athenaeum and started a periodical called The Antidote. He published ‘An Ode to Music’ on 1 February, and then on 10 February he published a thousand copies of The Daffodil Murderer as a 30-page booklet, priced sixpence. The front declared the contents to be ‘Brilliant Beyond Belief’. Sassoon’s name did not appear, but a pseudonym, Saul Kain. Crosland, under the guise of someone called William Butler, wrote a spoof preface, introducing the author: ‘Though a life-long abstainer, Mr Saul Kain is well acquainted with the insides of various public-houses.’ Only one paper reviewed the work, the Athenaeum, whose hatred of Crosland was reflected in a hostile review, which employed this acerbic comment: ‘The only conclusion we obtain from its perusal is that it is easy to write worse than Mr Masefield.’
Sassoon sent a copy of ‘An Ode for Music’ to Gosse but did not receive an immediate response. He sent him The Daffodil Murderer and waited. Three days after the publication of The Daffodil Murderer, Gosse wrote to Sassoon: ‘I have given a copy of the D[affodil] M[urderer] to Mr Edward Marsh. Mr Marsh is most curious to see what else you have written, and I would like you to make up a parcel of your pamphlets and send them to him. I should like you to get into friendly relations with Mr Marsh, who is a most charming man.’
It was a propitious introduction to another of the leading names of literary life in London and a senior civil servant with access to Asquith, the Prime Minister; he was also Private Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Like Gosse he enjoyed the literary and political gossip of the day, but, more importantly, they were both great encouragers of emerging talent. To this end Marsh used a bequest he had inherited to support young artists, especially young poets: ‘I should be ashamed of being comparatively well-off if I couldn’t take advantage of it to help my friends who are younger and poorer and cleverer than I am.’ Generous with his money and time, Marsh was also prepared to put his extensive network of well-placed friends and acquaintances at the disposal of his protégés. But he was not universally liked or trusted. Despite his sensitive position in the Civil Service, he could be indiscreet. Alan Lascelles, a future Private Secretary to the sovereign, records in his diary: ‘Eddie Marsh chatted to me so indiscreetly about other people’s indiscretions that I could have wrung his neck. He told me the last thing I should want to hear. I know why some people think it worthwhile hating him.’
Marsh was, however, a considerable literary critic and a generous friend. He was also, together with Harold Monro and Rupert Brooke, one of the prime instigators of the new movement of Georgian poetry. Recalling the genesis of the movement, he wrote:
There was a general feeling among the younger poets that Modern English Poetry was very good, and sadly neglected by readers. Rupert announced that he had conceived a brilliant scheme. He would write a book of poetry, and publish it as a selection from the works of twelve different writers, six men and six women, all with the most convincing pseudonyms. That, he thought, must make them sit up. It occurred to me that as we both believed there were at least twelve flesh and blood poets whose work, if properly thrust under the public’s nose, had a chance of producing the