Showcasing a special Graves collection
Robert Graves, poet, novelist, biographer, mythographer, classical
scholar and translator was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, a well-to-do
suburb of London, and died in 1985 in Deja, the Majorcan village he
had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish civil war and the
Second World War) since 1929.
Graves' career spanned the majority of the 20th century. He was a
youthful witness to the evolution of this century's self-conscious
notion of its own modernity. He nearly died fighting for a belief in
nation and England at a time when modern ideals were displacing the
notion of 'for king and country' with sometimes contradictory
socio-political ideals. He witnessed the same upheavals and suffered
many of the same trials of his avant-garde contemporaries (such as
Breton, Soupault and Apollinaire in France and T.E. Hulme, David Jones
and Wyndham Lewis in Britain) in the First World War yet, along with
other poets like Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon,
wrote about them very differently. He saw things going wrong again and
decided then to say 'Goodbye to All That' and try out life on his own
terms.
Graves' own poetry and prose is the best source for a description of
his war experiences. It suffices to say that Graves found neither
manhood nor glory but terror and madness in the war. He was wounded,
left for dead and pronounced dead by his surgeon in the field and his
commanding officer in a telegram to his parents but subsequently
recovered to read the report of his own demise in The Times. From
http://www.robertgraves.org/bio.php
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