Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint: Bloomsbury Continuum
Dimensions:
Width: 12.60cm
, Height: 3.40cm
, Length: 19.20cm
Weight: 0.360kg
ISBN: 9781399426305
ISBN 10: 1399426303
Pages: 480
Publication Date: 14 May 2026
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
Commanding ... To encounter [Graves] in these pages is to feel something of the relentlessly explosive energy with which he lived the first half of his life. Wilson lands him like a Zeppelin bomb. * Observer * This study of the devastating impact of the conflict on Graves makes for compelling reading. I cannot recommend it too highly. -- Nigel Jones * author of Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth * Diligent and insightful. * The Times * Wilson unveils the poet behind the man struggling to make, not write, poetry [and] clarifies our understanding of what Graves was about. * Literary Review * Consistently illuminating. -- Andrew Motion * Spectator * A sensitive rendering of the poet’s formative years ... finely nuanced. * Kirkus Reviews * A fine attempt to give Graves his due in the context of the Great War. * Evening Standard * This is an exemplary biography and a terrific entertainment … Wilson brings this difficult, unlovable but strangely impressive man yelpingly to life. * Sunday Times * Readable and absorbing. * TLS * Deft and commanding ... On a par with her other outstanding biographies. * BBC History Magazine * Measured and dispassionate … This is biography at its best. * Country Life * A well-researched, readable biography. * Library Journal * Anyone reading this book will come away with a fresh, and deeper, understanding of Graves and his writing – even if they have read previous biographies […] There is no doubt that in many ways Jean Moorcroft Wilson has outdone her predecessors. * PN Review *
Author Information
Jean Moorcroft Wilson is a celebrated biographer and leading expert on the First World War poets. Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper biography prize for her Isaac Rosenberg, she has also written biographies of Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Edward Thomas. She has lectured for many years at the University of London, as well as in the United States and South Africa. She is married to the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, on whom she has also written a widely-praised biography of place.
