The course that Graves had taken as a poet can be clearly seen in this revised edition of his Collected Poems, 1938, to which his work for a further nine years was added. A significantly recurring theme is that of the contemporary world seen as a haunted house. The proportion of disturbing poems in this collection is high, but should be taken as evidence that he endured the evils and uncertainties of his time as an actual physical experience, and towards the end a serenity if reached, not by conversion to any variety of religious or philosophical optimism, but by honest struggle through the bad lands and a new understanding of the language of poetic myth...