Goodbye to all That by Robert Graves — Read

MY parents were most disappointed when, because of the shop crisis and my illness, I failed to take the B. A. degree at Oxford. But Sir Walter Raleigh, as head of the English School, allowed me to sit for the later degree of Bachelor of Letters, and present a written thesis on any subject I chose. He also agreed to be my tutor on condition that he should not be expected to tutor me. He thought well of my poetry, and suggested that we should only meet as friends. Sir Walter was engaged at the time on the official history of the war in the air, and wanted practical flying experience for the task. The R. A. F. took him up as often as he needed, but he caught typhoid fever on a flight out East and died. His death so saddened me that I did not apply for another tutor.

I found it difficult to write my thesis. The Illogical Element in English Poetry, in the required academic style, and decided to make it an ordinary book. I rewrote it some nine times; and did not like the final result. I was trying to show the nature of the supra-logical element in poetry, which could only be fully understood, I wrote, by studying the latent associations of the words used - the obvious prose sense being often in direct opposition to the latent content. The book's weakness lay in its not clearly distinguishing between a poet's supra-logical thought processes and the sub-logical process of the common psychopath.