Graves’s Contemporary Techniques of Poetry gives an overview of various rival techniques of modern poetry and was an off-shoot from his B. Litt. thesis.
Dedicated to Edith Sitwell and with a cover design by Vanessa Bell, this long essay was published in 1925 as part of the Hogarth Press series. Importantly, it contained a poem by Laura Riding Gottschalk called ‘The Quids’, which had been awarded a prize by the Fugitives, an American group of poets and literary scholars such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren.
To Graves, the poem was a
‘first favourite with me’.