‘Like snow in a dark night’: Exile and displacement in the poetics of Robert Graves

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One of the reasons I think this essay is worthwhile is that it challenges the conventional image of Robert Graves as a self-confident sort of poetry worker in an old-world mode churning out texts that chide contemporaries for their weaknesses and fallen ways but somehow remote from the afflictions of modernity. I think the essay succeeds (I hope) to some degree in demonstrating that while he wrote poems that were formally and conceptually unlike those of his contemporaries, his sensibility was modern--doubt-ridden, divided and at odds with itself--but simultaneously capable of professing an unequivocal faith in the truth of poetry.

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