Poet at war …

… ‘Robert Graves’ Review: A Poet of Love and War - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Prose writing became a lucrative activity for Graves in the 1930s, resulting in some of his best-known works—“I, Claudius,” “Claudius the God,” “The White Goddess,” “The Greek Myths.” As pleased as Graves was by the proceeds, his great love, and unruly mistress, was poetry. “Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat,” he famously quipped. Although his love poems are acknowledged as among the 20th century’s finest, his war poems have languished by comparison. Blame may be laid on Graves himself, who, in his own words, “suppressed” all but a few, deeming them too redolent of “the war-poetry boom.” Now, 100 years after the armistice, Ms. Moorcroft Wilson capably restores Capt. Graves to the ranks of his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Rupert Brooke.