My choice of twenty-one poems (a number, I think, Graves would have liked!?), in chronological order, is guided by Graves’s exploration of the poetic of the contraries without which, as Blake put it, there is no progression or ‘Nature within her inmost self divides | To trouble men with having to take sides.’ (Robert Frost). The dilemma, as Graves sees it, is that ‘undualistic truth is hard to find’.

Instead of addressing/invoking the contraries separately as beauty and heavenly beauty, love and heavenly love in the inherited tradition of Skelton and Spenser, Graves sees them as twinned contraries: right hand poetry and left-hand prose, rhyme and reason (poetic unreason), head and heart, the poet and the reader/critic.

‘The identity of opposites had linked us’ (‘The Pact’, 683) so it is more like ‘Song of Contrariety’ and sometimes ‘jealous contrariety’. The mode is dialogue of one, between the contraries, as it were, even when the Muse is invoked, or like a walk between opposites to explore a point of ‘conjunction’ or ‘poise’ to use Graves’s word, and not as clashing arguments like imagined friendly or satiric characters on the stage in a theatre as in Donne and Yeats.

1. The Poet in the Nursery

2. The Spoilsport

3. The God called Poetry

4. Song of Contrariety

5. The Cool Web

6. Sick Love

7. In Broken Images

8. Warning to Children

9. The Reader over My Shoulder

10. Down, Wanton, Down

11. The Succubus

12. To Walk on Hills

13. The Climate of Thought

14. Cliff and Wave

15. The Face in the Mirror

16. The Naked and the Nude

17. The Second-Fated

18. Address to Self

19. The Meeting

20. Conjunction

21. The Pact

Devindra Kohli, formerly Professor of English at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, India, has taught at several universities in Germany, including the Universities of Muenster and Duisburg-Essen.