Graves & Sassoon

BOOK REVIEWS of the subject. The conception and early issues of the quarterly, particularly Ui reference to Aubrey Beardsley^ association with it, were addressed by Stanley Weintraub of Pennsylvania State University, the artist's biographer; Margaret Stetz of Georgetown University spoke on the part women played, with special emphasis on them as artists and authors, Ui the final numbers of the publication; and Karl Beckson of Brooklyn College CUNY summed up public reaction to and critical reception of the journal. The following day Samuels Lasner, whose personal collection contributed so much to the comprehensive display, spoke on "CoUecting the 1890s." Edwin Gilcher Cherry Plain, New York Clinton K. Krauss _____________ Montpelier, Vermont Graves & Sassoon Patrick J. Quinn. The Great War and the Missing Muse: The Early Writings of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; Associated University Presses, 1994. 297 pp. $45.00 PATRICK J. QUINN sets out to explore the often tortuous roads taken by two fellow poets, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, during and after the Great War, roads that ultimately led at the end of the twenties to the pubUcation by each of a form of autobiographical prose fiction. The book provides a map of the journey taken by Graves to reach Good-bye To All That and by Sassoon to reach the first of his Sherston trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Quinn detaüs Ui careful paragraphs Ui his preface an array of objectives to be pursued by his "hybrid" study: it wUl examine the developmental transitions Ui the two men's poetry both biographicaUy and critically; it wUl evaluate then· poems of the 1920s, many of which have been hitherto largely ignored by other critics; it wül explain why neither poet succeeded Ui exorcising their traumatic war experiences through the poetry they wrote after the war; it wül also discuss the war poetry itself, Ui order to gauge the "tremendous impact the war had on their personalities and artistic consciousnesses " (10); it wül use this comparative study to show why both men not only used autobiographical prose fiction to purge then· war experiences , but also then turned then· backs, Ui their own ways, on mainstream English society; and finally it wül seek to show the importance of the close personal and poetic involvement of the two poets with each 107 ELT 38: 1 1995 other. Given such a very broad (U connected and laudable) spread of opportunity, it is perhaps not surprising that the book is a little uneven Ui achieving what it sets out to accomplish. However, to place these two poets together not merely in theu· widely anthologized war years, but also in their struggles to find personal peace and artistic voice Ui the harsh wasteland of the 1920s is interesting, often Uluminating, and ultimately rewarding. Robert Graves's output of war poetry was not large, and his early work was often sentimental in tone and subject, and Georgian Ui style—an escape from rather than a confrontation with his experiences in the trenches. Later m the war, there were poems of graphic detaU, irony and experimentation, but these stUl tended towards meditation and myth, lacking the poetic sting of the best of Sassoon's (or Owen's) poetry of the same period. After returning home, unfit for further service at the Front, Graves married Nancy Nicholson Ui January 1918, and although the marriage proved increasingly disastrous for both of them, it initially provided the pastoral and nursery settings that inspired his early post-war poems, which, whUe not wholly successful, did begin to break away not just from Victorian poetic tradition, but from the Georgians' influence also. This break with the Georgian poets was accelerated by an examination of Modernism that would lead eventually to his discovery of his own particular poetic truth and style. On the way towards this discovery, Graves, growing ever more emotionally detached in voice, wrote poems examining criticaUy both bis neurasthenia and his disUlusionment with the covenant of love, but this psychological phase of his writing was Ui turn overtaken by a philosophical one—a metaphysical objectivism brought into his IUe by Basanta MaIlUc, an Indian graduate student at...