About the poet

　　Robert Graves (1895-1985), English poet, novelist, and classical scholar, born in London, and educated at the University of Oxford. Graves, who saw himself primarily as a poet, wrote vigorous, witty, and, at times, intellectual verse. His first volume of poetry, Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), recounts his World War I experiences. Early in his career, Graves was considered a Georgian poet (one of a group of early 20th-century poets who wrote conventional lyric poetry and maintained a late-Romantic style). As his career developed, he avoided identification with any school or poet and wrote with an intense, clear, and ordered voice. Several editions of his poems have appeared including Collected Poems (1959, 1975). His best-known poetic works are his love poems which combine passion with cynicism, love with eroticism, the personal with the universal.