Encouraged by fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, Graves gathered ten poems together and sent them to Chiswick Press. This privately funded edition appeared in February 1917 as Goliath and David.
By the time this slim volume appeared, Graves had been through much. He had been wounded severely with shrapnel, he had read his own obituary in the Times (as evoked in ‘Escape’), and after convalescing at Erinfa, the family holiday house at Harlech, Wales, he was back at the front.
Somewhat perversely, he missed the tension of the Front, and found that ‘the dark corridor which I call other where’ was where he could best craft his poems.