It tells the story of a young couple whose marriage is threatened by the intervention of a character with supernatural powers, including the ability to produce a shout that can kill all those around him.
It is informed by the circumstances in which it was written, Graves suffering at the time from neurasthenia as a result of his experiences in the First World War, and struggling with his relationships with his first wife, Nancy Nicholson, and the American poet Laura Riding.
At a lunatic asylum, the narrator acts as scoresman at a cricket match along with one of its inmates, Charles Crossley, a man who believes that his soul is split in pieces.
Richard takes a walk to the village church, and there meets a stranger who discusses the whereabouts of the soul with him and gives other signs of being the man in the dream, then mentions that he has spent 20 years with Australian Aborigines.
He claims that the Aborigines have taught him how to produce a shout which will kill, terrify or send mad everyone around him, and Richard cites parallels to this in Greek and Welsh mythology.
Graves agreed with reluctance, believing that the cuts were excessive, and the abridged story duly appeared in November 1929 under the imprint of Elkin Mathews & Marrot as a chapbook in an edition limited to 530 copies.
He believed the thesis of the story was that the poet, in practising his art, becomes a monster, while his beloved becomes "tyrannous, capricious, cruel and sinister": in fact, into a figure he was later to define in his book The White Goddess as the Muse.
The whole story, he considered, can be seen as a metaphor for the practice of writing poetry, in the way the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers had advised him to do: that is, as a therapeutic treatment intended to purge him of the psychological traumas he had suffered as a soldier in the First World War.
[16] He came to believe that "The Shout" had been prophetic, the appearance of Charles anticipating the irruption into his life three years later of the Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs, who had displaced him as Riding's lover.
[18] It was directed and co-written by Jerzy Skolimowski, and starred Alan Bates, Susannah York, John Hurt, Robert Stephens and Tim Curry.
[19] Based on Graves's story, it departs in significant ways from the original plot but, in Martin Seymour-Smith's view, successfully catches its atmosphere.