Gravesiana, our groundbreaking predecessor, published the first issue of its second volume, 2.1, in 1998. Twenty-seven years later, as The Robert Graves Review opens its second volume, perhaps a comparison would prove enlightening. Gr, 2.1 appeared a year after the previous issue, exactly as RGR, 2.1 has. In fact, Gr, 2.1 shifted the journal from being semi-annual towards becoming an annual. The first issue of Gravesiana consisted of sections, a characteristic The Review inherited, along with its primary foci (Critical Studies and Biography, with the addition of Poetry). Even the information and communications technology (ITC) around the journal is similar. Gr, 2.1 functioned alongside a discussion list and a website supported by The Robert Graves Trust, while RGR, 2.1 is companioned by a Robert Graves Society Facebook page and a discussion list run from Rutgers University meant to convey news relevant to Society members.

ICT systems in 2025 support a wider range of communication functions than in 1998. Ian Firla, then the incoming editor of Gravesiana, introduced subject and author indexes to the previous volume. Today, The Robert Graves Review website search engine provides keyword-based document retrieval, which renders a subject index only marginally useful and unlikely to reappear in the new future. The population of researchers working entirely with paper seems vanishingly small, whereas in 1998 Ian noted, ‘often a printed copy is what [was] most wanted’.[1] Gr, 2.1 existed solely in print as would all issues of Gravesiana until 2010 when it adopted a digital-only format. Now the digital version of the journal is its primary though not exclusive format.

The journals seem of comparable size. Gr, 2.1 contained two critical studies and one biographical; RGR, 2.1 offers seven critical studies and two biographical. But Gr, 2.1 published six reviews, including four book reviews, while RGR, 2.1 includes no book reviews. Gr, 2.1 contained one conference review – John Pressley’s report of the Society’s ‘White Goddess Conference’, the first conference since the two conferences the Society held in its founding year, 1995. RGR, 2.1 contains three conference reviews. These are ‘(Re)Marking the Invisible in the Work of Robert Graves’ (the Society panel at the 2025 Modern Language Association conference in New Orleans); ‘Robert Graves: His Life, Poetry, and Poems’ (the pop-up Zoom-mediated seminar on 7 May), and the ‘Classical Reception and the Work of Robert Graves and Laura Riding’ panel (at the ‘Classical Association Conference 2025’, held at the University of St Andrews).

In his White Goddess review, John Pressley examined the content of the presentations. His comparisons of the papers and the points of disagreement among the speakers regarding the importance of The White Goddess in Graves’s development as a poet are still fascinating, and many of the questions he raises still linger. Conference reviews in RGR, 2.1 are uncontroversial and, again, we find ITC changing the nature of our experience and expectations. Readers of The Review can view the recorded presentations on YouTube, multiple times. Critical reviews of conference papers, which the journal never really repeated, would be a valuable addition to our journal and find a welcome in our pages, but are not necessary to mediate the content of the papers.

Poetry was another of Ian’s innovations, which our journal has enthusiastically continued. RGR, 2.1’s Poetry section contains twenty-one poems by eleven poets, an increase over our last issue due to the efforts of our Poetry Editor UK (Sean O’Brien) and Poetry Editor USA (Rachel Hadas).

Superficially at least, The Robert Graves Review in 2025 seems to be proceeding along the same lines as Gravesiana in 1998. Like its predecessor, we are edging into new territory. The Review continues to encourage and highlight emerging research on the life and work of Robert Graves, while sustaining a steady focus on mature works of scholarship. Last year we began to preview works-in-progress in the form of papers read at the MLA convention (while, ut supra, pointing at videos of those paper presentations).

This year, three of the four MLA papers were successfully developed into articles, including Adriana Marinelli’s erudite discussion of the classical sources from which Graves drew to form the character of Claudius’s mother, Antonia, in ‘(In)visible Forces at Work: Robert Graves and the Ancient Historians in Crafting Female Characters in I, Claudius’, and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr’s bold valorisation of the child reader as central to Graves’s poetic project in his article ‘The Penny Fiddle Primer: Childhood, Opposition, and the Poetic Imagination’. Despite this fortunate turn of events depriving our Notes section of paper presentations, we expect to publish papers in future issues.

In this issue we are initiating a recycling program, bringing back worthy articles from the past under the rubric, ‘From the Archives’. The inaugural ‘From the Archives’ piece is ‘Robert Graves and Robert Frost: Poets of Terror and Trees’ by Devindra Kohli. Devindra’s study, originally presented as a paper at the fourth Society conference, ‘Robert Graves in America,’ thematically overlaps with several other articles in this issue that also look at Graves among his contemporaries or near contemporaries. These are Mick Gowar’s ‘Visualising the First World War: Notes on Poems by Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, Michael Longley and Philip Larkin’; Richard A. Kaye’s remarkable ‘The Most Terrible of His War Poems’: Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and the Hidden Anxieties of Post-War Homoerotic Revelation’ (the third of our progressed works-in-progress); and Philip Ward’s ‘Robert Graves and the Music of the 1960s’.

Bill Herbert’s article on Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Fingers of MacDiarmid Contract in a Report to the Recording Angel’ spins on the outer rim of this nucleus of overlapping conversations, since MacDiarmid relates to Graves only obliquely in Bill’s adaptation of the finger alphabet featured in TWG to explore MacDiarmid’s poetry, essentially brokering an imaginary conversation. Kirsten Norrie’s invocations of TWG are more mystical and focused on the woods – the selva oscura – rather than individual trees. In her ‘Meeting the Muse in the Woods’, Graves assumes the character of a Dante-esque pilgrim who encounters the mysterium in Mametz Wood. As well as establishing a neural junction with Bill’s essay, Kirsten connects to Philip Ward’s, through a wormhole / trapdoor, companioning his illuminating survey of musical celebrities influenced by Graves (such as Bob Dylan and Donovan) with hers of Hollywood celebrities, Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow and Jayne Mansfield – muses in the mind of Michael McClure.

Limited crowd sourcing is another new direction we are considering. Responding to Gregory Leadbetter’s article, ‘Which Flowers to Choose? Robert Graves and the Dilemmas of Anthologising’, we invited Society members to contribute to a Robert Graves anthology, the lone entry in our Notes section. Contributors, in order of appearance, are John Leonard, Judith Woolf, William Graves, Paul O’Prey, Anne Marsh Penton, Dunstan Ward, Adriana Marinelli, and the editor. Reinforcing some of Gregory’s observations, William provided a scholarly gloss replete with extracts of letters from his father pertaining to anthologies. While A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928) expresses Robert’s dislike of the genre, William draws a more nuanced picture, pointing out that there were anthologies to which he and Laura Riding willingly contributed, and observing, ‘It seems that they did not regard as “anthologised” the poems they chose themselves’. Our anthology was enabled by Gregory’s willingness to contribute a version of the keynote address he delivered at Oxford in September. We will look for other opportunities to engage Society members during the upcoming conference in Mallorca. Suggestions are welcome.

Of note regarding our place in the scholarly universe, an exciting email arrived in January informing us that the journal would now be included in The MLA International Bibliography and listed in the electronic version of its Directory of Periodicals. The MLA International Bibliography describes itself as the most widely distributed humanities database and the preeminent reference work in the fields of literature, language, linguistics, folklore, ethnomusicology, and teaching. The Bibliography lists over 2.4 million citations, and happily these will now include past and future contributions to The Robert Graves Review and its predecessors. This inclusion should result in more citations for RGR authors and thus a greater volume of submissions.

This year’s cover features an original artwork by Buzz Spector, which follows a practice initiated with RGR, 1.2 of illustrating the journal’s covers with artwork from contemporary artists. His cover succeeds work by Karen Guancione (2022), Béatrice Coron (2023), and Robin Ellenbogen (2024). Buzz created a unique sculptural bookwork, an alteration, employing a method of tearing pages of a book: in this case a copy of Good-Bye to All That. Our cover is the artist’s photograph of the altered book.

About Buzz’s alterations, the cristinerose contemporary art website says:

The books he uses may be seen as symbols of public history and personal memory, and of the dialectical relationship between these categories of knowledge. His altered volumes are mostly variations on a procedural theme of removal – pages torn or cut out in sequentially decreasing increments – creating a cross-section of the text block. The rows of fragmented letterforms visible across the field of torn edges are still organized like a page, but this text is unreadable.

Concerning the readability of the text, Buzz disagrees: ‘Nothing at all compromises legibility [….] You read the words through a sea of torn pages.’ In his essay, ‘I Stack Things, I Tear Things,’ he describes the discarded pages of the book as:

metaphors of forgetfulness. But I am more interested in acts of taking away that are also transmogrifications of the object. I remove such stuff as could make visible the remainder as armature of a different value.

Garrett Stewart features a theoretical and metaphysical discussion of Buzz’s alterations in his ‘Lector/Spector: Borges and the “Biblioject”’.

The time of the book Is Inner and Outer both, cognitively inhabited and implacably historical. That inner or textual time, of literary writing especially, is a process of variable tempo, of starts and stops, leaps and repeats, shifting intensities and continually readjusted levels of affect. By contrast, outer time may simply pass, the book as cultural object with it.[2]

We believe Buzz’s tearing Good-Bye to All That constitutes a serious artistic response to the life and to the major themes in the work of Robert Graves, as well as the biographical events narrated in the volume, and emphasizes their relevance to persistent, unspeakable acts of violence in our world today. We believe the piece will resonate on many levels for students of Graves’s work.

Speaking of visibility and visuality, with this volume, the digital version of The Robert Graves Review will no longer appear in Times New Roman. Our new typeface will be Cardo, designed by David J. Perry as part of an effort to create a high quality, open-license face. The roman face is Perry’s recreation of a fifteenth-century typeface designed by Francesco Griffo, for Aldo Manuzio’s 1496 edition of De Aetna by Cardinal Pietro Bembo, and thus comparable to the Bembo typeface designed by Stanley Morrison for the Monotype Company in 1929. Bembo was the most widely used book face in mid twentieth century UK and America. In the Monotype Recorder, Will Carter wrote that ‘without question [Bembo was] the finest roman of them all’. (Though we regret the absence of the extended nose on the lower-case e, which Morrison designed, I believe, in homage to Aldo’s printer’s mark, which featured a bottle-nose dolphin.)

Once again, we observe the passing of a dear friend – the indispensable poet, Michael Longley – and note, as Mick Gowar does in his essay, Michael’s affinity for Robert Graves. Mick quotes Michael’s joyful recollection of reading Graves as a Trinity undergrad with Derek Mahon while smoking Sweet Afton cigarettes: ‘from the beginning Robert Graves emerged as one of our heroes. We read his poems aloud to each other, counting the beats and scattering ash into the gully of the 1959 Collected Poems’.

Our warm thanks to everyone whose brains and heart brought this issue to light. Props to our manuscript readers and referees whose dedication shines through every page of this publication, to Sean O’Brien and Rachel Hadas for their transformative work on the Poetry section, to Philip Graves for website support, and William Graves and the Foundation for permission to quote from the works of Robert Graves. My profound thanks to Fran Brearton for insights into Michael Longley’s life and poetry, and Charles Mundye whose successful conference planning formed the basis for this issue. To the poets and authors here (especially newcomers Kirsten Norrie, Richard A. Kaye and Adriana Marinelli), our admiration along with our hope you find pleasure in each other’s company. As always, hugs for associate editors Lucia Graves, Carl Hahn, Patrick J. Villa and Alicja Bemben. Our admiration to Devindra Kohli and John Leonard, who appear in both GR, 2.1 and RGR, 2.1, and Dunstan Ward for his exemplary dedication to The Robert Graves Review. We will continue to look to all of you for every kind of help in the future.