Poems Selected by Himself by Robert Graves

On January 8, 1926, Graves, Nancy, their four children, their children’s nurse, and Laura Riding set out for Egypt, where Graves was to take up an appointment as professor of English in Cairo. He fought in France-the Somme, Souchez, Béthune, Loos, Cambrin, and Cuinchy-and was seriously wounded and reported dead in 1919, but survived in neurasthenic fright and lived near Oxford after the War. On leaving school he immediately enlisted as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His book appeared in the same year as its German counterpart, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and gained comparable note as witness to an era.īorn on July 24, 1895, at Wimbledon, London, to a mother of German descent and an Anglo-Irish father, Robert von Ranke Graves attended the better if not the best schools, culminating in Charterhouse.

Graves cleared out of England a month before Goodbye to All That was published saying goodbye, evidently, at once to Nancy, his children, England, the War, the whole shebang. In Goodbye to All That (1929) he told the first part of it, up to May 6, 1929, the day on which he left his wife, Nancy Nicholson, and their children and set up house-mostly in Deyá, Majorca-with the American poet and sage Laura Riding (born Laura Reichenthal in New York). He has lived his life and ordained the telling. They are trying to recover his “forgotten griefs” and “withered hopes” by the sympathetic method he recommended, limping “as he limped,” swearing “by the oaths he swore.” But the main difficulty biographers of Graves meet is that he has prescribed his own story and every variant of it. Scholars have been blowing on Graves’s embers since he died in 1985. “To bring the dead to life,” according to one of Robert Graves’s poems, “is no great magic”:

Poems Selected by Himself by Robert Graves