Robert Graves the Poet

A Guardian review of the new biography of Robert Graves notes the writer's fading reputation as a poet: "So it’s with no small ambition that Jean Moorcroft Wilson – the author of well-received biographies of Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Edward Thomas – sets out to reassert both the importance of Graves’s poetry and the centrality of the trenches to his life and work," writes Edmund Gordon. More from this piece:

During his lifetime, Graves “suppressed” (his word) most of the 100 or so poems he wrote about the war, but they have been readily available since the publication of his Complete Poems (2000). They only rarely evoke the detail of life at the front: less direct than those of Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, they tend to approach the horrors of modern warfare via the ambiguities of ancient myth. Moorcock Wilson quotes liberally from them, and makes a good case for their minatory power. But she hasn’t managed to dig up any previously unknown work. What she calls her “most dramatic” discovery – Sassoon’s annotated copy of Goodbye to All That, in which he rails against his former friend’s indiscretions and exaggerations – would be much more dramatic in a biography of Sassoon, since it’s his character the find reveals.

The paucity of fresh material may account for some of the book’s more curious emphases. Graves’s previous biographers have followed their subject’s lead in identifying his mother as the cause of his extreme prudishness (shading into an outright horror of heterosexual relations), which persisted into his mid-20s. German-born Amy Graves was intensely religious and moralistic, so puritanical in her outlook that her children were forbidden to go to the theatre. Moorcroft Wilson wants to treat her more fairly than her predecessors have, but the evidence she musters for the defence isn’t exactly dynamite. Amy was “far from inflexible”, she insists at one point: “Robert remembered persuading her to let them play charades on a Sunday, for example, providing the scenes were all Biblical.

 

Moorcroft Wilson is much better when writing about Graves’s adult milieu and is especially good on his relationships with Sassoon and TE Lawrence...