Some months before the completion of the first volume of what he referred to as his ‘real autobiography’, The Old Century and Seven More Years, Sassoon wrote to his friend H.M. Tomlinson outlining his autobiographical endeavour:

This statement reveals several essential points about the poet's autobiographical intentions: it aligns his efforts with the tradition of Prelude-like autobiographical accounts of the developing poet, also evoked by Henry James; it stresses the stylistic attempt to parallel the mode of narration with the consciousness of the developing self; it positions the book's prose-poetry prelude as the ‘keynote’ and in so doing suggests that the first two volumes in particular, which chart his life until 1914, are essentially a story; and it emphasises the impact of the outbreak of the First World War on this developing poetic consciousness. The unmistakable divide between ‘before’ and ‘after’ the War establishes his wartime experiences as an axis around which all of his development revolves. The statement says all of these things, but perhaps its most important message, expressed between the lines, is the author's obvious awareness of the artistic value of his new work. In recounting his early years for a second time, Sassoon kept his focus squarely, as he wrote in his notebook while composing The Old Century, on ‘the story of my effort to become a famous poet’. Despite being straight autobiography rather than fiction, Sassoon's second foray into prose writing is more creatively ambitious than his earlier novels and marks a high point of his literary output. The quality of the prose, the self-reflexive focus on writing that makes literary art a principal theme of the narrative, and the unexpected reimagining of the poet's journey in the final chapters of the last volume, Siegfried's Journey, all justify such an assessment.