Robert Graves: War Poems

Charles Mundye is an English lecturer and Head of Academic Development at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the editor of Keidrych Rhys: The Van Pool (Seren, 2012), and has written on Graves and other poets of the period. He is currently President of the Robert Graves Society. Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a poet, novelist, critic, and classicist. He published more than 140 works, including Goodbye to All That, his classic memoir of World War 1, The White Goddess, a speculation on poetic inspiration, and the novels I Claudius and Claudius the God, which were successfully adapted for television. He was an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in World War 1 and was one of the first to write realistic poems about front line experience. He intervened on behalf of his friend and fellow officer Siegfried Sassoon when he faced a court martial, and suffered from ‘shell shock’, though he wasn’t hospitalized for it. After the war he lived largely as a writer and was a significant and well-connected literary who influenced myriad writers directly and indirectly. His literary reputation remains high today.