Robert Graves
From Great War Poet to Good-bye to All That (1895-1929)
Robert Graves
From Great War Poet to Good-bye to All That (1895-1929)
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Description
'An exemplary biography' -- Sunday Times
'Commanding' – Observer
'Diligent and insightful' – The Times
This revelatory biography of Robert Graves re-examines his position as a major First World War poet, as well as a master prose writer.
The writer and poet Robert Graves suppressed virtually all of 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' depended mainly on his prose memoir, Good-bye to All That.
In this exemplary biography, Jean Moorcroft Wilson relates Graves's fascinating early life, his experiences in the war, his being left for dead at the Battle of the Somme, his leap from a third-storey window after his lover Laura Riding's even more dramatic jump from the fourth storey, his move to Spain and his final 'goodbye' to 'all that'.
Containing startling new archival material about the breakdown of the friendship between Robert Graves and the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, including photographs, Dr Moorcroft Wilson traces not only Graves's compelling life, but also the development of his poetry during the First World War, his thinking about the conflict and his shifting attitude towards it.
Table of Contents
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
Product details
| Published | 14 May 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 480 |
| ISBN | 9781399426305 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Continuum |
| Illustrations | 2 x black and white 8-page plate sections |
| Dimensions | 198 x 129 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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