Poets Of The Great War - Robert Graves

Poets of the Great War: Robert Graves (2013)
by Robert Graves
Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780571320042
Condition: As New
As sold by Crappy Old Books

Here we have Robert Graves — soldier, survivor, poet, memoirist, professional dismantler of romantic illusions — presented in a crisp 2013 Faber edition that looks as though it has been waiting patiently on a shelf for the centenary to begin and for you to finally take it seriously.

This is not the Great War as recruitment poster. Nor is it the Great War as tidy, commemorative heritage trail. Graves writes with the clarity of someone who was there and subsequently lost patience with nonsense. His poetry carries that peculiar mixture of lyric beauty and emotional restraint that seems uniquely British: mud rendered in metre, disillusionment in dignified stanzas, and horror translated into something almost deceptively civilised.

Part of Faber’s handsome Poets of the Great War series, this volume gathers Graves’s wartime verse into a compact, accessible form. It’s the kind of book that manages to feel both academically respectable and quietly personal — equally at home on a university reading list or beside a well-thumbed copy of Goodbye to All That.

Unlike many books about the First World War, this one does not shout. It observes. It remembers. It tightens its jaw and continues.

Condition-wise, this copy is As New — which is rather fitting, given the age of the material within. The pages are clean, the binding firm, and the overall appearance suggests it has spent more time being admired than aggressively annotated in pencil by someone determined to locate metaphors for shell shock.

Ideal for:

• Readers building a Great War poetry shelf

• Those who prefer understatement to bombast

• Students who want the verse without the library fines

• Anyone who suspects that the quietest voices often carry the sharpest truths

Available now from Crappy Old Books, where history remains beautifully bound, occasionally sobering, and always worth reopening.

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