robert graves memoir good bye to all that

The unsentimental and frequently comic treatment of the banalities and intensities of the life of a British army officer in the First World War gave Graves fame, notoriety and financial security, but the book's subject is also his family history, childhood, schooling and, immediately following the war, early married life all phases bearing witness to the 'particular mode of living and thinking' that constitute a poetic sensibility. Graves is conspicuously absent from Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the last chapters of which concern the war, but heappears in Memoirs of an Infantry O cer, Sassoon’s 1930 novel. Until his son, William Graves, reprinted almost all the Poems About War in 1988, Gravess status as a 'war poet' seems to have depended mainly on his prose memoir Goodbye to All That. Includes illustrations and explanatory footnotes.

Goodbye to All Th at was the fi rst narrative chronicling their war-time friendship. The writer and poet Robert Graves suppressed virtually all the poems he had published during and just after the First World War. Goodbye to All That, with its vivid, harrowing descriptions of the Western Front, is a classic war document, and also has immense value as one of the most candid self-portraits of an artist ever written. The title may also point to the passing of an old order following the cataclysm of the First World War the supposed inadequacies of patriotism, the interest of some in atheism, feminism, socialism and pacifism, the changes to traditional married life, and not least the emergence of new styles of literary expression, are all treated in the work, bearing as they did directly on Graves's life. Graves’s memoir was the last straw for their deterioratingfriendship. 'It was my bitter leave-taking of England,' he wrote in a prologue to the revised second edition of 1957, 'where I had recently broken a good many conventions'.

Good-Bye to All That is an autobiography by Robert Graves which first appeared in 1929, when the author was 34 years old.

Robert graves memoir good bye to all that