With the centenary of World War I, the 2014 issue of Gravesiana is devoted to the theme of ‘Robert Graves and the experience of war’. This was also the title of the Sixth International Robert Graves Conference at the British Council and the University of London Institute in Paris in 2004, and papers presented at the conference provided the basis for ten of the articles in this issue. Other articles originated in the 2007 Robert Graves Society conference on the poetry of Robert Graves at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and the 2012 conference on Robert Graves and modernism at St John’s College, Oxford. All the articles have recently been revised.

This special war issue of the journal features an interview by

Lucia Graves with the late John C. Bennett, who, as a fellow Royal Welch Fusilier, witnessed the death in action of her brother David Graves in Burma in March 1943.

Two major Robert Graves publications since the last Gravesiana, both of them timely, are reviewed here. The war poems are given a key place in Robert Graves: Selected Poems, edited for Faber by the poet Michael Longley, which is discussed by Miriam Gamble; and William Graves welcomes the Penguin Modern Classics edition of the original 1929 text of Good-bye to All That, edited by Fran Brearton, with an introduction by Andrew Motion. Finally, a new study of Graves, Riding, Richards, Empson and the New Criticism is assessed by Charles Mundye.

Dunstan Ward, formerly Professor of English at the University of London Institute in Paris, edited with Beryl Graves the Carcanet and Penguin Classics editions of Robert Graves’s Complete Poems.