Though he lived most of his life in the remote village of Deya on the island of Mallorca, Robert Graves (1895--1985) was conversant with the most important issues of this century and was acquainted with many of the most powerful people. Jorge Luis Borges called him -a soul above.- Graves wrote almost restlessly on subjects of great diversity: myths of the Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and Celts; modern science and economics; contemporary society and culture as well as of ancient Greece and Rome, of Celtic Wales and Ireland, of the time of Milton, and of the American Revolution.

He was a poet of...

Here is the inimitable Henry Miller (1891-1980) speaking candidly about himself and his robust fiction--Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. In this enticing collection he argues convincingly for the things that have mattered in his full and exhilarating life. He and his interviewers cover the range of his engrossing works that stirred obscenity charges, as well as his life as an expatriate, his loves and conquests, his goals, his beliefs, and his probing insights into the culture that produced him and repulsed him.

These conversations...

Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society.

In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western...