This is a collection of essays and lectures providing us with Graves's idiosyncratic, yet always interesting, views on poetry. There are occasional excursions into other areas, for example his essay on Nietzsche is fascinating, and extraordinarily wrong-headed (but then it was written in the 1930s). Graves's wit is very much on show, a bit heavy-handed (his slap at Pound's translation of Sextus Propertius is definitely that) and not as funny as he thought it was. In my undergraduate university's library the card catalogue called this book "The Crowing Privilege". Looking over it 35 years later, I can certainly say that Graves takes that privilege to great lengths. Still, a useful read for perspective on literary history. ( )