Selected Poems

沒有一種詩比出自一次世界大戰的士兵所寫的詩更觸動人心的了。《The Great War Poets》系列這次重新編排了四個世界大戰時英勇參戰的戰地詩人，其中包含了Siegfried Sassoon、Wilfred Owen、Robert Graves、Edward Thomas、Rupert Brooke和David Jones。（見下方連結）

Robert Graves was one of our most fascinating poets of the last century. Born in London in 1895, he served in the First World War and was mistakenly reported killed in action at the Battle of the Somme, as he vividly recounted in his memoir, Goodbye To All That (1929). While serving in France, he befriended Siegfried Sassoon, and would be instrumental in saving Sassoon from the threat of court-martial that followed his declaration against the prolonging of the war. When Graves visited Sassoon at Craiglockhart Hospital he met Wilfred Owen, and for a time the three poets began to work closely in what Michael Longley, this volume's editor, calls 'a momentous coincidence of talent'.

But Robert Graves is far more than a war poet. His verse blossomed in the decades following the conflict, and in 1925 he met the American poet Laura Riding, who encouraged the development of his critical writing and became the muse of his totemic prose work, The White Goddess (1948), a vast canvas that he titled 'a historic grammar of poetical myth'. Graves's brilliant but unorthodox rendering of The Greek Myths (1955) remains a landmark publication amid an extensive output that included essays, fiction, biography, dramatic monologues, ballads and works for children. He died in 1985 and is commemorated Poets' Corner at in Westminster Abbey.

This edition of Robert Graves's poems is scrupulously selected by Michael Longley from across the full range of his lifetime's verse. It includes an illuminating introduction in which Longley makes a convincing case for the relevance, importance and brilliance of this remarkable writer.

 【相關閱讀】
>> 《Siegfried Sassoon》
>> 《Wilfred Owen》
>> 《Rupert Brooke》
>> 《David Jones》
>> 《Edward Thomass》

 

 

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a poet, novelist and critic. His first volume of poems, Over the Brazier (1916), reflected his experiences in the trenches, and was followed by many works of poetry, non-fiction and fiction. He is best known for his novel, I, Claudius (1934), which won the Hawthornden and James Tait Black memorial prizes and for his influential The White Goddess (1948).