Book Description

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and professional relationships with other writers including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, drawing on many unpublished letters in the process.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.