Robert Graves (1895-1985)

English poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic.

English Literature

Cecilia H. C. Liu

Robert Graves• Born in Wimbledon, south

London• Not graduated from Oxford

University but joined in 1914 the British Army.

• During World War I Graves served alongside Siegfried Sassoon in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The regiment was involved in some of the heaviest fighting on the Western Front. Graves was severely wounded on the Somme and being listed by mistake in military casualties troubled him a decade.

Robert Graves

• The controversial autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929), a chronicle of the disillusioned postwar generation, became a huge bestseller but alienated several of Graves‘ friends, notably Sassoon and Edmund Blunden.

• In 1926 Graves moved to Egypt to work as a professor at the University of Cairo.

(Source)

Robert Graves

• Perhaps best known for the historical novel I, Claudius (1934), with its sequel Claudius the God (1943), autobiographical war memoirs and controversial study The White Goddess (1948), in which Graves rejects the patriarchal gods as sources of inspiration in favor of matriarchal powers of love and destructiveness. The Muse, or Moon-goddess, inspires poetry of a magical quality, in contrast to rational, classical verse.

Robert Graves

• Graves considered himself primarily a poet, but he could not live by poetry. His early lyrics were written in gloomy, late-Romantic style. His later works dealt mainly with love and marriage, birth and death, often set within a mythological framework. Classical literature and mythology became Graves a constant source of inspiration. His views on intuition and poetry Graves summarized in his essay 'The Case for Xanthippe' (1960).

• According to Graves, women and poets are natural allies. Abstract reasoning is a predominantly male field of thought, and rational schooling discourages intuitive thought.

"Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence."

• Reason fails to prompt the writing of original poems, and shows no spark of humor or religious feeling. Philosophy, under the name of abstract reasoning, is antipoetic.

Robert Graves

• In the 1940s Graves became interested in myths and history. Studies of goddess lore led him also reinterpret the genealogy of Jesus, and rewrite the Gospels. In the historical novel King Jesus (1946) he presented Jesus as a sage and poet, and rejected the mystical Virgin Birth doctrine.

• From 1961 to 1966 Graves was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford - he was 66 when he delivered his first lecture in this office.

Robert Graves

Robert Graves• With Laura Riding Graves collaborated on

a number of literary projects, but their personal relationship was undermined by infidelities.

• A SURVEY OF MODERNIST POETRY (1927), published by Seizin Press, contained close analysis by Riding which influenced the New Criticism. By the end of the 1930s their paths separated. Riding married in 1941 Schuyler B. Jackson (d. 1968). Graves fell in love with Beryl Hodge, the wife of his friend, with whom he returned to Mallorca in 1946 and married her in 1950.

Laura Riding 1901-1991

• "Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric." ~ Robert Graves (source)

Robert Graves

Image: Robert GravesMajorca© Leo Fuchs 1962

Idolization/ worship of women

• Graves had two wives, but idolized and loved various other women. In his thirties and early forties, he was involved with Laura Riding, a fellow poet and critic; in his fifties and sixties, his "muses" were beautiful, talented, twenty-ish women.

• Graves liked Frost, John Crowe Ransom, and E. E. Cummings (his American discoveries); found some redeeming qualities in Eliot and Dylan Thomas; found no redeeming qualities in Yeats, Pound, or Auden.

The White Goddess

• The White Goddess is one of the names given to the Earth Mother; the Moon goddess, to Venus, Astarte, Lilith, Belili, the Muses, the Three Graces and to innumerable other female deities. She is found in the myths and legends of all cultures.

• This was a nature-based religion which involved close observation and celebration of the seasons and of the moon and the planets. Its bible was written in the stars for all to see, and its hymns were the songs of birds and the sighings of the breeze. The worship of the White Goddess reached its highest level in the time of the Minoans (say 1600 BC).

• In that period, the sea-trading Minoans carried their religion from their ports in the Mediterranean as far as Ireland in the west; and to tropical Asia in the east. Of the goddess-temples founded, the highest may have been that of Sappho on the island of Lesbos. The goddess-temples are of great importance to scholars, for they are the source of the alphabet we use; the musical scales we use, of the concept of poetry, of the calendar, of astronomy and history, and of formal mathematics and the sciences.

The White Goddess

• This culture fell in a cataclysm in approximately 1600 BC, but was resumed by Achaeans (proto-Greeks), and by other civilizations honoring the nature goddess. The temple's role at the pinnacle of human culture and achievement lasted until the second century anno domine, when the high priestess of the temple of Isis was murdered. The fall of the temple on the Nile marked the end of goddess-worship as a manifest or established religion, and the beginning of the Goddess' long career in hidden religion, that is, in the occult .

The White Goddess

Reference

• The Fallen Temple: A Search for the White Goddess. 20 Feb. 2006 <http://www.big.com.au/fallen/>.

• Robert Graves. Biography. 20 Feb. 2006 <http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rgraves.htm>.

• The Robert Graves Archive. 20 Feb. 2006 <http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispjh/graves/>.