1. 1. INTRODUCTION (By Paula Piquero) Sandra Gisbert
2. THOMAS
STEARNS ELIOT (1888-1965)
(A Song for Simeon) (By Patricia García)
Sandra Gisbert
3. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865 – 1939)
(The Second Coming and A Coat) (by
Sandra Gisbert)
4. ROBERT GRAVES (1895-1985) (my task) Sandra Gisbert
(A Dead Boche)
5. DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
(1885-1930) (By Marga Martí) Sandra Gisbert
(Why Does She Weep)…
6. WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN (1907 – 1973) (By Tania Martínez) Sandra Gisbert
(September 1, 1939)……………………
7. DYLAN MARLAIS THOMAS (1914-1953)
(By Xihong Liu)
Sandra Gisbert
(Vision and Prayer)
8.CONCLUSION (By Paula Piquero) Sandra Gisbert
9.BIBLIOGRAPHY…Sandra Gisbert
4. ROBERT GRAVES (1895-1985) (my task)
The third author we are going to
deal with is Robert Graves. First of all we are going to do a biographical
vision of his life which influenced his writings. Robert Graves was born on July
24, 1895,
in Wimbledon, near London. His father was a Gaelic scholar
and minor Irish poet. His mother, Amalie Von Ranke Graves, was a relation of Leopold Von Ranke, one of the founding fathers of modern historical
studies. Furthermore, Robert was greatly influenced by his mother's puritanical
beliefs and his father's love of Celtic poetry and myth. As a young man, he was
more interested in boxing and mountain climbing than studying, although poetry
later sustained him through a turbulent adolescence.
Moreover, in August 1914 he enlisted
as a junior officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He fought in the Battle of
Loos and was injured in the Somme offensive in 1916. While convalescing, he
published his first collection of poetry, Over the Brazier. By 1917,
though still an active serviceman, Graves had published three volumes. In 1918, he spent
a year in the trenches, where he was again severely wounded. In January 1918,
at the age of twenty-two, he married eighteen-year-old Nancy Nicholson. But
traumatized by the war, he went to Oxford with his wife and took a position
at St. John's College. Graves's early volumes of poetry, like those
of his contemporaries, deal with natural beauty and bucolic pleasures, and with
the consequences of the First World War. Over the Brazier and Fairies
and Fusiliers earned for Graves the reputation as an accomplished war poet.
After meeting the American poet and theorist Laura Riding in 1926, Graves's poetry underwent a significant
transformation. She persuaded him to curb his digressiveness and his rambling
philosophizing and to concentrate instead on terse, ironic poems written on
personal themes.
In 1927, Graves and his first wife separated
permanently, and in 1929 he published Goodbye to All That, an
autobiography that announced his psychological accommodation with the residual
horror of his war experiences. Shortly afterward, he departed to Majorca with Laura Riding. In addition to
completing many books of verse while in Majorca, Graves also wrote several volumes of criticism, some
in collaboration with Riding.
Although Graves claimed that he wrote novels only
to earn money, it was through these that he attained status as a major writer
in 1934, with the publication of the historical novel I, Claudius, and
its sequel, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina.
At the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Graves and Riding fled Majorca, eventually settling in America. In 1939, Laura Riding left Graves for the writer Schuyler Jackson;
one year later Graves began a relationship with Beryl Hodge that was to last until his death.
After World War II, Graves returned to Majorca, where he lived with Hodge and
continued to write. By the 1950's, Graves had won an enormous international reputation
as a poet, novelist, literary scholar, and translator. In 1962, W. H. Auden went
as far as to assert that Graves was England's "greatest living poet."
In 1968 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. During his lifetime he
published more than 140 books, including fifty-five collections of poetry (he
reworked his Collected Poems repeatedly during his career), fifteen
novels, ten translations, and forty works of non-fiction, autobiography, and
literary essays. From 1961 to 1966, Graves returned to England to serve as a professor of poetry
at Oxford. In the 1970s his productivity fell
off; and the last decade of his life was lost in silence and senility. Robert
Graves died in Majorca in 1985, at the age of ninety.[1][10]
After this biographical background
we are going to analyse one of his poems contained in Fairies and Fusiliers
(1918) and which is the number nineteen. It is called A Dead Boche:
A Dead Boche[2][11]
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
Firstly I
have to say that the word “boche” is used as a
derogatory name of a German soldier. So it is like saying “A dead German
soldier.” Secondly, he is addressing us through the poem but it is more significant
at the beginning “To you who’d read my songs of War/ and
only hear of blood and fame” (Verses 1 and 2). In addition to this, he is telling us how the war is “War’s
Hell!” and if you have a doubt he
continues describing something that had happened today while he was fighting. ”War’s
Hell! and if you doubt the same, / Today I found in Mametz
Wood / A certain cure for lust of blood:” Furthermore, he continues saying that the thing was “In a great
mess of things unclean,” between the
disaster of a War. It was “Where, propped against a shattered trunk,” to
finally end the poem telling us what the thing he found was. It was a German
soldier “Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk /
With clothes and face a sodden green, / Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired, /
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.” During this poem Robert Graves is
showing us how bad a War is principally to the people and to the soldiers who
most of them do not have any election about going to war or staying at home.