PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThough Graves is best remembered, at least in the United States, as a novelist, memoirist, and historian, Moorcroft Wilson has written a poet’s biography. A reader who couldn’t be bothered to acquire a copy of Graves’s war poems...could almost reconstruct an anthology from the quotations Moorcroft Wilson includes. She is adept at linking Graves’s verse to his life, but never loses sight of it as art. The book’s central failing must stem from Moorcroft Wilson’s ambition: because she treats Graves at such length and in such depth, the book ends well before its subject has conceived, much less written, the works that he’s best known for. The twin Falls of Graves and Riding (Graves capitalized the incident) and the subsequent composition of Good-Bye to All That make for a dramatic conclusion, but readers eager to learn of The White Goddess and I, Claudius must wait for the next volume.
