Patrick Quinn was a professor of English and the general editor of the Complete Works of Robert Graves, a monumental and a comprehensive project published by Carcanet Press which includes the poet's poetry, short stories, and other writings in twenty-five double volumes. Patrick’s work involved extensive editing and curation, and a significant contributing to the scholarly study and public recognition of Graves's literary output. 

I first met Patrick in 1994 during the run-up to Robert Graves’s Centenary at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. I was helping set up The St John’s College Robert Graves Trust at Oxford which later received many Graves’s letters and manuscripts for safekeeping. We hit it off immediately. At the time Patrick, with Richard Schumaker, was editing Focus on Robert Graves and His Contemporaries with various academic friends of his, through the Department of English at the University of Maryland`s European Division, and Nene College, Northampton, where he was teaching.

Patrick helped me organize, together with John Kelly, Senior Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, the Robert Graves Centenary Conference at St John’s in September 1995. The Centenary Conference was carried over to Mallorca that November, where it was accompanied by magnificent Exhibition, La Vida de Robert Graves , opened in La Lonja, Palma, the spectacular civic building built in 1,430 AD. It was during the Mallorca Conference, November 1995. that the Robert Graves Society was constituted with Patrick Quinn as its President.

As President of The Robert Graves Society, Patrick substituted Focus on Robert Graves with an up-market Journal of the Robert Graves Society called Gravesiana. The first volume of Gravesiana appeared in June 1996 with Patrick as the editor and his postgraduate student, Ian Firla, as sub-editor. Shortly afterwards Patrick stepped down and Ian took over as editor. After a series of other editors the magazine it is now edited by Michael Joseph in the USA, now under the title of The Robert Graves Review.

While president, Patrick helped set up the biannual Robert Graves International conferences and which settled down, after Manchester, Buffalo and Paris and Rome, to alternating between St John’s College and Mallorca. When it was proposed, Patrick also took over as editor-in-chief of the monumental Carcanet edition of Robert Graves Complete Works in some twenty-five large volumes each edited by reputed academics. He kicked it off the edition with his Centenary Selection of Poetry by Robert Graves. Many of the editions, including the monumental edition of Robert Graves’s Complete Poems edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward, are reprinted by Penguin books.

Eventually Patrick moved on to new pastures leaving a solid Robert Graves Society with all its attributes: he was followed in the presidency by Dunstan Ward. After Patrick Quinn left the editorship in 1998, he was replaced by Ian Firla, and he by Patrick J. Villa, until it was then taken over by Dunstan Ward, Fran Breaton and Charles Mundye. But Patrick continued as editor of the Carcanet Complete Works until the final volume papered in 2010. Patrick appeared sporadically at Robert Graves conferences. He will be missed.