Selected Poems. By Robert Graves. Edited by Michael Longley. Faber and Faber; 176 pages; £15.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

ROBERT GRAVES is not remembered for his poetry. A British writer born to “Irish-Scottish-Danish-German” parents in 1895, he is best known for his memoir of the first world war, “Goodbye to All That”, as well as for a historical novel “I, Claudius” and for his books on the Greek myths, which introduced classical deities to everyday readers. His poetry was, in his own words, “eccentric”. Unlike Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, he is not publicly venerated as a first-world-war poet. Although he wrote at the same time as modernists such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and spent 13 years of his life with Laura Riding, an experimental American writer, he himself preferred “traditional metres and rhymes”. As a result, his poems have been largely neglected.

A new collection of his selected poems, edited by Michael Longley, an Irish poet, aims to draw more readers to his work. From 1916 until his death in 1985, Graves wrote over 140 works of fiction, non-fiction, memoir and poetry. His poems, with what Mr Longley describes as their “strange brocaded richness”, influenced Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin. Few writers wrote so piercingly about the first world war.

Certain themes emerge. Married twice, with several lovers and at least eight children, Graves was a prolific writer of love poems. Sparing and mostly unsentimental, these poems reverberate with echoes of John Donne, a 16th-century poet and writer of metaphysical love poetry: “We looked, we loved, and therewith instantly/Death became terrible to you and me.”

Graves writes with a jaunty lyricism, moving from sonnets to ballads. Poems about nature, the graceful swoop of birds in flight and the delightful “quiet of an English wood” recur throughout the collection. Characters from Greek myths frequently appear. He was not afraid to make up words, such as “lubberland of dream and laughter”, or veer into nonsense verse.

But the finest poems in this collection are those that deal with the first world war. Graves fought in France in 1915 at the Battle of Loos and on the Somme, and was reported dead at 21. On returning to England he suffered from shell shock; the noise of a car backfiring would send him to the ground. His poetry recalls his time in “soul-deadening trenches”, when mice would crawl down the backs of soldiers as they dozed between engagements. In combat there is a sense of “unreality/in the proceedings”. Back home the faces of the dead are glimpsed amid the living. Over it all hangs the unanswered question, “Is this joy?—to be doubtless alive again,/And the others dead?”

The strength of this collection lies in the way it places early, unpublished poems about war alongside his later, more introspective works, conveying the poet’s continuity and evolution. Later poems that can seem, according to Mr Longley, like “an alibi for an old poet’s philandering” are left out. Only the best remain. They are a timely reminder, nearly 100 years on, of the horrors of war and of the transcendence of the poetry that survives it.