The Early Poetry of Robert Graves

The Early Poetry of Robert Graves
Author: Frank L. Kersnowski
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2013-11-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0292700814

Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society. In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western idea of reality—reason and predictability. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves's early poems of a figure he later called "The White Goddess," a being at once terrifying and glorious, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves's family, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski argues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy.

Selected Poems

Selected Poems
Author: Robert Graves
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: English poetry
ISBN: 9780571283835

A new and essential selection from one of the great figures of 20th Century English Poetry and Literature.

Over the Brazier

Over the Brazier
Author: Robert Graves
Publisher: DigiCat
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2022-06-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

"Over the Brazier" is a great work by Robert graves. The book entails numerous wonderful poems with great insight interested personnel in war poetry will give high regard to many of them for the perspective they give of the first world war.

Robert Graves

Robert Graves
Author: Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2018-08-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1472929152

Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-bye to All That casts new light on the life, prose and poetry of Graves, without which the story of Great War poetry is incomplete. 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' seems to have depended mainly on his prose memoir (and bestseller), Good-bye to All That. None of the previous biographies written on Graves, however excellent, attempt to deal with this paradox in any depth. Robert Graves the war poet and the suppressed poems themselves have been largely neglected – until now. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, celebrated biographer of poets Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas, relates Graves's fascinating life during this period, 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'. In this deeply-researched new book, containing startling material never before brought to light, 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.

The White Goddess

The White Goddess
Author: Robert Graves
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 516
Release: 1966-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780374504939

The White Goddess is perhaps the finest of Robert Graves's works on the psychological and mythological sources of poetry. In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.

War Poems

War Poems
Author: Robert Graves
Publisher: Seren is the book
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: War poetry, English
ISBN: 9781781723296

Robert Graves's War Poems is a significant publishing event, the first book to collect all of Graves's poems from and about World War One, including for the first time the whole of 'The Patchwork Flag', and a number of poems never previously in print. It includes poems written while Graves was on active service on the Western Front, and many from the years that followed, revealing his changing perspectives on the First World War and other contemporary and historical conflicts. Graves's is an authentic voice, and his experience of fighting at both the Battle of Loos and the Battle of the Somme produces poetry revealing an extraordinary combination of fantastical and realistic nightmare. War Poems collects Graves's first two major published volumes: Over the Brazier (1916) and Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), which incorporates poems from the privately-printed pamphlet Goliath and David. In 1918 Graves completed a third major collection of poems, to be called 'The Patchwork Flag', but which was never published as a whole. For many years the typescript lay in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and now appears, excitingly, almost a century after composition, as an unexpected addition to the canon of First World War poetry. Graves's poems are accompanied by an informative Introduction, which explores Graves's personal and professional relationships with other writers including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, drawing on many unpublished letters in the process. Explanatory notes explore specific biographical, cultural, military and historical contexts. The poems are published in their first edition, first impression form, a return to first principles also recently adopted in the new edition (2014) of Good-bye to All That, Graves's 1929 classic war memoir, a companion text to the War Poems. -- from dust jacket.

First World War Poems from the Front

First World War Poems from the Front
Author: Paul O'Prey
Publisher: Imperial War Museum
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1912423324

From the worst horrors of modern trench warfare a small handful of soldiers and nurses created a body of poetry that is so vivid and intense that one hundred years later it has engraved itself on our national consciousness. This anthology focuses on those poets who were on the front line, from the famous Sassoon, Owens and Graves, to nurses like Vera Brittain. The poems are accompanied by a brief and accessible introduction, which sets the context for a reader new to the poems, as well as short biographical profiles of the poets.

Fairies and Fusiliers

Fairies and Fusiliers
Author: Robert Graves
Publisher: New York : A. A. Knopf
Total Pages: 116
Release: 1918
Genre: World War, 1914-1918
ISBN:

The Nazarene Gospel Restored

The Nazarene Gospel Restored
Author: Robert Graves
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Total Pages: 1075
Release: 2023-03-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1800173776

The Nazarene Gospel Restored is Robert Graves's major work on the life of Jesus, written in collaboration with the distinguished Hebrew scholar Joshua Podro. The research and writing occupied them for over ten years, in a working relationship compounded, in John W. Presley's phrase, 'of argument, scholarship and mutual respect', in which the imaginative writer and the Hebraist drew on their vast knowledge of the ancient world to reveal an extraordinary new, 'true' story of Jesus. The result is, as Graves wrote to T.S. Eliot, 'a very long, very readable, very strange book', and one that Presley argues is as central to Graves's thought as The White Goddess. The Nazarene Gospel Restored was controversial when first published: the Church Times refused to advertise it, reviews were hostile, and Graves twice sued for libel. In the twenty-first century it is possible to read it in the context of a continuing engagement with the historical Jesus, both scholarly and popular. In this new edition, John W. Presley gives a detailed account of the composition and reception of the book, setting it in the context of Graves's writing and of biblical scholarship. The inclusion of Graves's Foreword and annotations for a project revised edition make this an indispensable resource.