A. P. Graves (Alfred Perceval Graves) Biography

Irish poet and editor, son of the Protestant Bishop of Limerick and the father of Robert Graves; born in Dublin, where he was educated at Trinity College. Before taking his final examinations he left Dublin to become a clerk at the Home Office in London and in 1874 began his career with the Board of Education. In Dublin he had been encouraged as a poet by Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Poems he edited in 1896. Songs of Killarney (1872), his first collection of verse, set the consistently Irish tone of his work, the best-known being contained in Irish Songs and Ballads (1879) and Father O'Flynn and Other Poems (1889), the humorous title-piece of which was widely popular. The Irish Poems of Alfred Perceval Graves was published in two volumes with a preface by Douglas Hyde in 1908. Graves was active in London's Irish Literary Society from its foundation in 1891, and was twice its president in later years. He produced numerous anthologies, including Songs of Irish Wit and Humour (1884) and The Book of Irish Poetry (1915). Welsh material was added to work of Irish provenance in later collections he edited, among them A Celtic Psaltery (1917). His autobiography To Return to All That (1930) appeared a year after the publication of Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (1929).