Books: The Fine Art of Swearing

OCCUPATION: WRITER (320 pp.)—Robert Graves—Creative Age ($4).

With the two words of his title, explains Robert Graves, "I fill in my income-tax return—but cynically because 'writer' has become almost meaningless as a descriptive term since popular education opened the dikes to a shallow sea." Having blared this raspberry into the face of the "antipoetic world of commerce and bureaucracy," tetchy Poet Graves admits that he has been forced to spend much of the last quarter-century earning bread for his seven children by churning out historical novels for the antipoetic market. What bothers him now...