Home icon. The Works of Robert Graves. Exhibition: 1 April to 17 June 2011.

Cabinet 8: Egypt and Seizin Press


Contemporary Techniques of Poetry: A Political Analogy.

Robert Graves, Contemporary Techniques of Poetry: A Political Analogy. London: Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 1925.

Graves’s Contemporary Techniques of Poetry gives an overview of various rival techniques of modern poetry and was an off-shoot from his B. Litt. thesis.

Dedicated to Edith Sitwell and with a cover design by Vanessa Bell, this long essay was published in 1925 as part of the Hogarth Press series. Importantly, it contained a poem by Laura Riding Gottschalk called The Quids’, which had been awarded a prize by the Fugitives, an American group of poets and literary scholars such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren.

To Graves, the poem was a

‘first favourite with me’.