GRAVES, Robert.

£1,850 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Good-bye to All That. First edition, first state, with the Sassoon poem intact on pages 341-3. Sassoon was upset to learn that the book contained a poem he had written to Graves in letter form and demanded the excision of the offending pages from the edition. Higginson estimates that less than 100 copies of this first state exist.Centred on the author's experiences in the First World War, the book was published more than ten years after the end of the conflict, when Graves was still suffering from the trauma of fighting in the trenches. It was written in less than four months and under the influence of the young American poet Laura Riding, his lover and muse. "She also acted as intellectual and spiritual midwife both to a kind of personal rebirth, and to Graves's writing Good-bye to All That (1929), the war-period autobiography which made him famous. In its original form, this is a searing work of genius in which Graves offers up a heavily rewritten version of his past life upon the altar of his present love" (ODNB).In all subsequent states, the Sassoon poem and a passage on page 290 were excised and replaced with cancels and asterisks.

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