Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-Bye to All That (1895-1929) - Paperback

by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Author)

'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.

Author Biography

Jean Moorcroft Wilson is a celebrated biographer and leading expert on the First World War poets. Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper biography prize for her Isaac Rosenberg, she has also written biographies of Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Edward Thomas. She lectured for many years at the University of London, as well as in the United States and South Africa.