Oxford Addresses on Poetry discusses "the hard core of our English poetic inheritance, namely poems inspired by the Muse rather than commissioned by Apollo, God of Reason," to quote Graves's foreword. "A good many of the younger University members agreed with me that such poems are alone likely to survive concentrated pressures from commercialized or politically slanted literature and entertainment," Graves observes, and continues: "The ornate academic Victorian tradition and the more recent but no less artificial Franco-American modernism, seemed to them equally bankrupt…." As his Muse-worship hardens into dogma, Graves seems to envision it here as the basis of a literary program. But such programs are, of course, Apollonian; and furthermore Graves does not really believe any living poets are worth reading. His thesis is, therefore, as applied to contemporary poetry, completely negative. (Curiously, however, he reminds his readers on occasion that he and Laura Riding wrote...