He was born in London, England, on July 24, 1895, and grew up in a well-established British family, with German ancestry on his mother's side and Irish on his father's. Robert von Ranke Graves was one of the most prolific poets of the twentieth century, with an active career that spanned six decades. Tells much about the author that should be taken into account when reading this autobiography. Looking back almost thirty years later, their affair might have seemed unimportant to him, but the material that is in the earlier edition A major change in the 1957 edition, for example, is the removal of information about Laura Riding, a poet with whom Graves was deeply involved in 1929.
While revision usually leads to improvement, many critics believe that the cuts he chose to make actually detracted from the book and made the book a less honest work, taking away some of the immediacy and confusion that made the original version ring so authentic. Graves revised Good-Bye to All That in 1957 at the request of an American publisher. His suffering shows in the disjointed methods he used-combining excerpts from letters, poems by himself and others, army commands and ramblings-to create a sense of the disorder he had felt since his time in battle. The book was published in 1929, more than ten years after the war's end, at a time when, like many writers who had lived through the war, Graves was still suffering from the trauma of fighting and was angry about the whole concept of war. Graves' factual tone makes the remarkable seem unremarkable and the ordinary seem well worth examining. The descriptions of battle are horrifying, and the descriptions of military bungling and pomposity are darkly amusing. There were many fine, powerful memoirs published about the First World War, and Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That is considered to be one of the most honest and insightful.
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