When these poems, written between the ages of fourteen and twenty, first appeared, I was serving in France and had no leisure for getting the final proofs altogether as I wanted them. The same year, but too late, I decided on several alterations in the text, including the suppression of two small poems inexcusable even as early work. These amendations appear in this new edition, but I have left the bulk of the book as it stood. ROBERT GRAVES.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

When these poems, written between the ages of fourteen and twenty, first appeared, I was serving in France and had no leisure for getting the final proofs altogether as I wanted them. The same year, but too late, I decided on several alterations in the text, including the suppression of two small poems inexcusable even as early work. These amendations appear in this new edition, but I have left the bulk of the book as it stood. ROBERT GRAVES.

First published in 1943, The Reader Over Your Shoulder remains required reading for anyone who wants to write more clearly and artfully. Editor Alan Hodge and I, Claudius author Robert Graves enjoin the writer to write as if "a crowd of his prospective readers . . . were] looking over his shoulder," anticipating possible questions and criticism. They identify the most common blunders writers make and lay out forty-one principles--twenty-five dealing with clarity of statement, sixteen with grace of expression--while showing us how to avoid them. Their insights are as fresh and...

The ancient city of Troy really existed. The Trojan War that figures in Homer's two great epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, really happened. But there is much more to it.

Leave it to one of the English language's greatest practitioners, Robert Graves, to flesh out the story in a very short book for children, first published in 1962, and out of print for more than three decades. According to Graves, "English literature, to be properly understood, calls for as close a knowledge of the Trojan War as of the Bible: Helen's beauty, Odysseus's cunning, Hector's noble courage,...

A real historical figure, the British surgeon Dr. William Palmer was accused in 1856 of murdering fourteen people by means of poison. The Dr. Kevorkian trial of the 19th century, with a bit of O.J. Simpson mixed in for good measure, the scandal entranced nearly the entire population of the British Isles. Everyone had an opinion on the case--including esteemed poet and historical fabulist Robert Graves. They Hanged My Saintly Billy is true crime as only a true literary master could write it, with exquisitely rendered portraits of Palmer's era and milieu, told from the shifting...

Homer's Daughter is Robert Graves' novel of the girl, Nausicaa, a character in the Odyssey, who Graves believed was a its true author (not the blind and bearded Homer, whose Iliad was composed at least 150 years before.... ). That Homer did not write the Odyssey continues to be a bold historical and literary claim. Add to it Graves's protofeminist heroine, and a radical modern classic is born.

In his Historical Note, Graves says the novel "re-creates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances which induced Nausicaa to write the Odyssey, and suggest how,...