Books: Songs of a Bent-Nosed Jove

COLLECTED POEMS (358 pp.)—Robert Graves—Doubleday ($5.95).

"Prose has been my livelihood," writes Robert Graves in The White Goddess, "but I have used it as a means of sharpening my sense of the altogether different nature of poetry." The author's wish is clear: to be judged for his poetry, not for the 70 or so books of excellent autobiography, historical fiction, criticism, classical scholarship and translations from several languages that he has written in the past 40 years. Using A. E. Housman's litmus for a true poem ("Does it make the hairs of one's chin...