Goodbye to All That

The poet’s “account of trench life . . . still grips the reader,” making his WWI memoir “a classic of English autobiography, and a subversive tour de force” (The Guardian).

Goodbye to All That is English poet and soldier Robert Graves’s “bitter leave-taking” of England after his experiences during World War I. A testimony to the shifts in society following the war, the book offers an unsentimental and often satiric account of life as a British Army officer facing the intensity of battle, as well as the personal history that led to his becoming a poet.

Finding refuge in Majorca, Graves wrote Goodbye to All That in eleven weeks. His accounts of trench warfare and his descriptions of war atrocities incited controversy, making the book a literary sensation and funding Graves’s vow to “never make England my home again.”

Consisting of Graves’s memorable encounters with fellow writers and poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Thomas Hardy, and the changing societal views on married life, Goodbye to All That, is a classic war memoir and a candid portrait of artistic life.