Mud, blood and poetry

MARK BOSTRIDGE recommends a biography that places Robert Graves’s stirring war poetry back at the centre of his story

Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-bye to All That 1895–1929 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson Bloomsbury Continuum, 480 pages, £25

In this centenary year of the end of the First World War, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, veteran biographer of the war poets, has turned her attention to Robert Graves, who celebrated the coming of peace and the ending of the ‘ horror’ by recognising that he would never be truly free of all the associations and memories of his wartime experiences.

Graves, she argues, is now most famous for Good-bye to All That, the outspoken, at times fanciful, but endlessly re-readable autobiography with which he drew a definitive line under the story of the first half of his life.

Graves’s war poetry was often suppressed by Graves himself during his long and prolific postwar writing career. However, it is not only technically brilliant, with its realism an important influence on Siegfried Sassoon – and through Sassoon, on Wilfred Owen – but also a significant biographical key to our understanding of his extraordinarily tempestuous life.

Drawing on the poems and on recently discovered documentary material, Moorcroft Wilson shows the ways in which the after-effects of the shock of war propelled Graves into a first marriage, to Nancy Nicholson, founded on childrearing and family stability, and then into a different kind of warfare, as he grappled with the increasingly egotistical and outrageous demands of his mistress and ‘goddess’, Laura Riding.

Enlisting a week after war was declared, at the age of 19, Graves fought in two of its bloodiest battles, Loos in 1915 and the Somme a year later (where he was presumed dead). What is so deft and commanding in Moorcroft Wilson’s

account, and the mark of its distinction, is the way in which she unpicks Graves’s war poems. She enables us to see them both as reflective of his childhood and upbringing – the nightmares that haunted his sleep are linked to his terror as he lies badly wounded on the Somme – and as presaging his future belief in a muse of poetic inspiration in their preoccupation with myth, legend and ancient history.

The war would never “be over once and for all”, as Graves had hoped. Here, Moorcroft Wilson gives us a study on a par with her other outstanding biographies, and re-establishes Graves’s importance as a poet of 1914–18.

Mark Bostridge’s books include Vera Brittain and the First World War (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Fateful Year (Viking, 2014)