Siegfried Sassoon (I often refer to him as ‘The Boy Who Lived’) is perhaps best known now for his friendship with Wilfred Owen.

They’re an interesting pair, because, although both poets were furiously angry about the First World War, their anger feels very different to me.

Owen’s is often bewildered: a horrified, almost incredulous response to the things he sees. How can this be happening? How can anyone call this glorious?

Sassoon’s anger is more contemptuous. He knows exactly what he thinks of the generals, the rhetoric, and the comfortable assumptions that send young men into battle. And that contempt gives his poetry something Owen’s often doesn’t have: black humour.

Take The General, for instance:

“Good-morning; good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead…

It’s an extraordinarily efficient piece of satire. The General is cheerful, polite and pleasant. Meanwhile, the men he’s just sent towards the trenches are, in Sassoon’s wonderfully understated phrase, “most of ’em dead”.

There’s no need for explosions, corpses or heroic speeches. Just a smiling General, a line of tiny soldiers, and the quietly devastating realisation that the people making the decisions are rather less likely to experience their consequences.

Sassoon was himself a decorated soldier, which makes his contempt all the more interesting. He wasn’t criticising war from a safe distance: he had fought it, and fought it bravely.

Perhaps that’s why his anger bites so hard.

Owen looks at the horror and seems confused by it. Sassoon looks at the people responsible and looks thoroughly unimpressed.

Different poets. Different kinds of anger. Both devastating.

Over to you: who are the angriest authors you’ve read? Which are their angriest texts?