Robert Graves turned 81-years-old this year. Now, in the heart of a prolonged critical reaction against his psychoanalytical investigations, his literary commentary and mythmaking, his Collected Poems are being published in America for the first time. The present volume contains all the poetry Graves has authorized for publication in his nearly 60 years of writing. The early Georgian poems are here, humorous, charming, unpretentious; and the amatory nursery rhymes and country sketches, written, Graves has said, to subdue memories of the First World War. Then follow anti-Romantic poems and the ironic, purified, and polished jewels of the years Graves spent with Laura Riding; the more familiar elaborations on the myth of the White Goddess; and a recent, somewhat contradictory preoccupation with the goddess of wisdom. But most of ali, here is a poet who searched valiantly for a breadth of imagery and form to contain his central theme of love; it's only regrettable that a more handsome volume is not in the offing. But this does supply a fine; brief biographical introduction by lames McKinley.
