Collected Writings on Poetry

The phases of his critical writing are distinct, linked by a serious creative intent and a remarkable eloquence. From the 1925 volume Poetic Unreason and Other Studies to his collaborative works with Laura Riding (not included here), to The Common Asphodel (1949) and other work, much of it hard to find, Graves's concerns and discoveries are often momentous. It is as though, almost single-handed through the harsh anti-Romantic years and into the decades of irony, he maintained and defended the lyric tradition, making it classical and viable against the tide. As advocate, polemicist and mythographer, he has exercised a constant influence on poets, readers and critics ill at ease with fashion, hungry for the traditions that underlie the merely conventional.