'Orphans of Poetry': The poetry of childhood and the poetry for children of Robert Graves. Issue 1 (1st December 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Joseph, Michael
• Is Part Of: Book 2.0. Volume 6:Issue 1/2(2016)
• Page Start: 9
• Page End: 20
• Publication Date: 2016-12-01
• Subjects: Book industries and trade -- Technological innovations -- Periodicals; Publishers and publishing -- Periodicals; Book design -- Periodicals; Electronic publishing -- Periodicals; Books -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 070.5
• DOI: 10.1386/btwo.6.1-2.9_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2042-8022

Abstract

'Orphans of Poetry' examines poems by Robert Graves in order to argue three related points: that Graves's ideas about childhood and children's poetry, which anticipate more contemporary attitudes, were significantly shaped by his harrowing experience in the trenches in World War I; that Graves had an extraordinarily complex idea of nonsense as something larger than reasonableness and believed in its 'explanatory power', a belief arising from a philosophical scepticism he adopted when he was in his early twenties; that his idea of nonsense dovetailed with the notion of poetic truth, or a kind of knowledge accessible only through poetry or only to readers of any age who had the capacity to conceptualize in the mode of a poet.