Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
It is the war memoir to end all war memoirs. Robert Graves's autobiographical masterpiece savages the conduct of the 1914-18 conflict in a searing satire that at once reviles the fighting and reveres the courage and resourcefulness of the servicemen caught up in it. As astonishingly fresh and readable as ever, Goodbye to All That chronicles this highly eccentric soldier-poet's early life from the cruelties and injustices of public school through the unspeakably real horrors and ineffable absurdities he encountered on the Western Front, all the way the brink of a glittering and controversial literary career.
'It is a permanently valuable work of literary art, and indispensable for the historian either of the First World War or of modern English poetry.. Apart, however, from its exceptional value as a war document, this book has also the interest of being one of the most candid self-portraits of a poet, warts and all, ever painted. The sketches of friends of Mr Graves, like T.E. Lawrence, are beautifully vivid.' (Times Literary Supplement)
Robert von Ranke Graves was born in 1895 in London. His Anglo-Irish father, Alfred Perceval Graves was a civil servant and sometime poet, journalist and song-writer. His mother, Amalia von Ranke, of German family, was Alfred's second wife. Each of Alfred's marriages produced five children, among whom Robert was the eighth. In 1914, shortly after leaving Charterhouse school, Robert took a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was seriously wounded at the Somme in 1916 but had published two volumes of poetry by 1917. He married in 1918, read English at Oxford, had four children and struggled to make a living as a poet until having a great commercial success with Goodbye to All That in 1929. He separated from his wife in that year, clashed with fellow poets including Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden over the book and fled to Majorca with a mistress. Besides forced exiles during the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, he remained in Majorca thereafter, accruing 140 published books including the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, several more collections of poetry and his controversial musings on verse The White Goddess as well as translations of Classical works and a popular reference book The Greek Myths. He remarried in 1950, had four more children, served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1961-65 and died in 1985.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781909621053 |
| ISBN 10 | 1909621056 |
| Title | Goodbye to All That |
| Author | Robert Graves |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Publisher | Pan Macmillan |
| Year published | 2013-09-01 |
| Number of pages | 440 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |