Robert Graves was one of the greatest and most prolific British writers of the 20th century, the author of numerous volumes of poetry, as well as countless essays, historical novels (including the well-known I, Claudius and Claudius the God), and the marvelous nonfiction work The White Goddess.

A writer of striking originality, he spoke with a highly individual yet ordered voice in which lucidity and intensity combine to a remarkable degree. His love poetry, some of his best-known and most distinctive work, is at once cynical and passionate, romantic and erotic, personal and universal. He wanted his poetry to act as a "spiritual cathartic" to the poet and the reader. His work has been described as "romanticism boiled dry," a striving for the pure, the unpretentious, the essential, the vigorous, and the "non-literary."

This volume represents Graves' final thoughts on his prodigious body of work, containing those poems which he most wanted to see survive.