Robert Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry (Robert Graves Programme: Lives & Letters)

Robert Graves was born on 24 July 1895 into a richly literary environment. His father was a poet and a schools inspector. He followed, with firmer tread, in his father's footsteps. As a scholarship boy he went to Charterhouse and then to Oxford. His course was interrupted by the First World War, in which his poetry began to mature and in which he was famously reported slain in action in 1916. Shell-shocked, he went on to St John's, Oxford. There in 1918 his hugely prolific writing life began in earnest. The phases of his critical writing are distinct, linked by a serious creative intent and a remarkable eloquence. From the 1925 volume Poetic Unreason and Other Studies to his collaborative works with Laura Riding (not included here), to The Common Asphodel (1949) and other work, much of it hard to find, Graves's concerns and discoveries are often momentous. It is as though, almost single-handed through the harsh anti-Romantic years and into the decades of irony, he maintained and defended the lyric tradition, making it classical and viable against the tide. As advocate, polemicist and mythographer, he has exercised a constant influence on poets, readers and critics ill at ease with fashion, hungry for the traditions that underlie the merely conventional.