Description
Book SynopsisThe writer and poet Robert Graves suppressed virtually all the poems he had published during and just after the First World War. Until his son, William Graves, reprinted almost all the Poems About War in 1988, Graves''s status as a war poet seems to have depended mainly on his prose memoir Goodbye to All That. None of the previous biographies written on Graves attempt to deal with this paradox in any depth. The suppressed poems themselves have been largely neglected--until now.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, celebrated biographer of Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas, relates Graves'' fascinating life during the period from his birth up until the early 1930s: his experiences in the war, his being left for dead at the Battle of the Somme, his move to Spain, and his final goodbye to Sassoon in 1933. In this deeply-researched new book, containing startling archival material never previously revealed and little-studied poems, Moorcroft Wilson traces how Graves'' compelling
Trade Review
Commanding ... To encounter [Graves] in these pages is to feel something of the relentlessly explosive energy with which he lived the first half of his life. Wilson lands him like a Zeppelin bomb. * Observer *
Jean Moorcroft Wilson has built an unassailable reputation as our leading authority on the poets of the Great War ... Combining intelligent and perceptive criticism of his work, with revealing insights into the man, this study of the devastating impact of the conflict on Graves makes for compelling reading. I cannot recommend it too highly -- Nigel Jones * author of Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth *
Diligent and insightful ... Jean Moorcroft Wilson teases the truth from Graves’s exaggerations, mis-rememberings and downright gibs ... She is by turns compassionate and caustic and is clear sighted … [Her] close reading of the war poems is illuminating. * The Times *
Wilson unveils the poet behind the man struggling to make, not write, poetry [and] clarifies our understanding of what Graves was about * Literary Review *
Consistently illuminating -- Andrew Motion * Spectator *
A sensitive rendering of the poet’s formative years ... finely nuanced * Kirkus Reviews *
A fine attempt to give Graves his due in the context of the Great War * Evening Standard *
This is an exemplary biography and a terrific entertainment … Wilson brings this difficult, unlovable but strangely impressive man yelpingly to life * Sunday Times *
Readable and absorbing * TLS *
Deft and commanding ... On a par with her other outstanding biographies * BBC History Magazine *
25 years after the last biography, a fresh approach … Measured and dispassionate … This is biography at its best * Country Life *
A sensitive rendering of the poet's formative years … A sympathetic perspective on Graves' eventful life. * Kirkus Reviews *
A well-researched, readable biography * Library Journal *
Anyone reading this book will come away with a fresh, and deeper, understanding of Graves and his writing – even if they have read previous biographies […] There is no doubt that in many ways Jean Moorcroft Wilson has outdone her predecessors. * PN Review *
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction 1 'A Mixed Letter' 2 Victorian Beginnings and an Edwardian Education (1895-1909) 3 Charterhouse: 'the Public School Spirit' (1909-12) 4 Charterhouse: Of Cherry-Whiskey and Other Matters (1912-14) 5 'On Finding Myself a Solider' (August 1914-May 1915) 6 'These Soul-Deadening Trenches' (May-July 1915) 7 The Battle of Loos (August-October 1915) 8 Siegfried Sassoon and a Recipe for Rum Punch (October 1915-March 1916) 9 The Road to High Wood (March-July 1916) 10 The Survivor (July 1916-February 1917) 11 A Change of Direction (March-June 1917) 12 A Protest, Craiglockhart and 'A Capable Farmer's Boy' (June-July 1917) 13 The Fairy and the Fusilier (October 1917-January 1918) 14 Babes in the Wood (January 1918-January 1919) 15 A Poet on Parnassus (January-October 1919) 16 Oxford and 'Pier-Glass Hauntings' (October 1919-March 1921) 17 'Roots Down into a Cabbage Patch' (1921-5) 18 From Psychology to Philosophy and Beyond 19 Into the Unknown: Cairo and Laura Riding (January-June 1926) 20 The World Well Lost (June 1926-April 1927) 21 'Free Love Corner' (May 1927-October 1928) 22 'Like the Plot of a Russian Novel' (February-April 1929) 23 'A Doom-Echoing Shout' (26 April-June 1929) 24 Good-bye to All That (June-November 1929) Abbreviations Notes Select Bibliography Acknowledgements Index
