PositiveThe Wall Street Journal[A] brisk, rewarding account of the innovative doctors and their \"neurasthenic\" patients who suffered unprecedented psychological distress (and in unprecedented numbers) on the Western Front.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal\"Pugnacious as a youth, with a boxer’s broken nose, Graves later became something of a mystic—a disciple of the poetic muse, his White Goddess. Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s painstaking account of Graves’s war years culminates, a decade after the fighting, in the publication of his classic memoir Good-bye to All That ... Although his love poems are acknowledged as among the 20th century’s finest, his war poems have languished by comparison. Blame may be laid on Graves himself, who, in his own words, \'suppressed\' all but a few, deeming them too redolent of \'the war-poetry boom.\' Now, 100 years after the armistice, Ms. Moorcroft Wilson capably restores Capt. Graves to the ranks of his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Rupert Brooke ... Graves’s best war poems stand cheek-by-jowl with the finest of his generation, yet his reputation has never relied primarily on them.\
Jonathan Blunk
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalAdopting a clear, novelistic style, Mr. Blunk’s narrative is both cogent and thoroughly informed. On Wright’s trail for three decades, he wears his research lightly. There are, inevitably, minor glitches...it might have been good to have more of Wright’s ecstatic and occasionally catty voice in his letters. But these are quibbles. With his lucid portrait of Wright, Mr. Blunk has performed a major service. Wright holds an honored place in mid-20th-century poetry.
