Ward, Dunstan (ed.), Joan Miquel Fiol & Juana María Seguí (ass. eds.) 2008: The Art of Collaboration: Essays on Robert Graves and his Contemporaries. Colección Estudis Anglesos, Universitat de les Illes Balears. Palma de Mallorca: Edicions UIB. ISBN: 978-84-8384-003-0. 242 págs.

SUMMARY
Robert Graves is one of twentieth century literature’s emblematic individualists, yet, paradoxically, he had a remarkable gift for collaboration. The fourteen essays in this collection explore a range of the artistic and intellectual alliances that lay behind a substantial proportion of the 140 works of this prolific poet and polymath. Some involved fellow poets such as Thomas Hardy, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, John Crowe Ransom, and pre-eminently (and controversially) his partner and muse Laura Riding, but they were also focused on fiction, biography, criticism, biblical studies, mythology, translation, and book design and publication. These essays by international scholars and writers illuminate important aspects of the work of Robert Graves and his contemporaries and of the complex phenomenon of creative collaboration.

CONTENTS

Introduction ..............................................................................7
by Dunstan Ward.

Formative Friendships
“‘A Sense of Kinship’: Robert Graves and Thomas Hardy”, ...... 11
by Michael Irwin.
“Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon”, .................................... 29
by Max Egremont.
“‘For God’s Sake Cheer Up’: Graves’s Advice to Owen and
its Results”, ................................................................................ 45
by Dominic Hibberd.
“Poet to Poet: T. E. Lawrence and the Riddle of ‘S.A.’”, ............ 57
by Georgianne Ensign Kent.

Graves, Riding, and the Seizin Press
“‘Free-lance Modernists’ at Work Together: The Early
Textual Dialogue of Robert Graves and Laura Riding”, .............. 69
by Karen R. Daubert.
“Len Lye, Robert Graves and Laura Riding: Designing Books
for the Seizin and Hours Presses”, ............................................ 93
by Candida Ridler.

Between Poet and Poet
“The General Eliott and Captain Carpenter: Graves’s
Collaboration with John Crowe Ransom on Grace After Meat”, ...115
by Matthew Betts.
“‘As for The White Goddess, You’re Largely Responsible for My
Writing that Book’: The Collaboration between Robert Graves
and Lynette Roberts”, ................................................................137
by Selma Karayalçýn.

Robert Graves, Joshua Podro, and Raphael Patai
“‘All God’s Words in his Left-Hand Coat Pocket’: Joshua
Podro, Robert Graves, and The Nazarene Gospel Restored”, ..........145
by John W. Presley.
“Poet and Scholar: Robert Graves’s and Raphael Patai’s Hebrew
Myths”, .......................................................................................155
by Nancy Rosenfeld.

Robert Graves and Translation
“Many a Winter in Majorca: Robert Graves and/on
George Sand”, ........................................................................... 173
by Joan Miquel Fiol.
“From Witchcraft to the Rubaiyyat: Robert Graves and the
Shah Brothers”, ......................................................................... 185
by Grevel Lindop.

Unacknowledged Collaborations
“The Unwitting Collaborators”, ................................................205
by Juana Maria Seguí.
“Beyond Graves: Collaborations with the Dead”, ......................213
by Fran Brearton.

Notes on Contributors .......................................................... 237

 

 

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