Robert Graves Biography and List of Works
English
poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic who produced some 140 books.
Graves is 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 favour of matriarchal powers of
love and destructiveness. "Philosophy
is antipoetic. Phisosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual
uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start,
he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets
mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of
a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government
scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of
majority voting, which smothers personal views." Graves
was born in Wimbledon, south London, into a middle-class family. His father,
Alfred Percival Graves, was a school inspector, a Gaelic scholar and the
author of the popular song 'Father O'Flynn'. His mother, Amalie von Ranke
Graves, was a great-niece of the German historian Leopold von Ranke
(1795-1866). Graves's childhood was a happy one, although he hated his
school. He was educated at Charterhouse, where he started to write poetry and
published his first volume of poems, OVER THE BRAZIER, in 1916. Graves did
not graduate from Oxford University but joined in 1914 the British Army. During
World War I Graves served alongside Siegfried Sassoon in the Royal Welsh
Fusiliers. He was severely wounded on the Somme and being listed by mistake
in military casualties troubled him a decade. Graves married the painter and
feminist Nancy Nicholson in 1918, and took his BLitt in 1926. In the same
years Graves moved to Egypt to work as a professor at the University of
Cairo. He was accompanied with his wife, children and the poet Laura Riding,
with whom he established the Seizin Press and published the journal Epilogue
(1925-38). In 1929 Graves moved with Riding to Deya, in Mallorca, where he
lived the most of his life. The outbreak of Spanish Civil war forced them
leave the island, and after brief periods in Lugano, Brittany and London,
they sailed for America in 1939. "And
if condemned to relive those lost years I should probably behave again in
very the same way; a conditioning in the Protestant morality of the English
governing classes, though qualified by mixed blood, a rebellious nature, and
an overriding poetic obsession, is not easily outgrown." The
controversial autobiography GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT (1929), a chronicle of the
disillusioned post-war generation, became a huge bestseller but alienated
several of Graves's friends, notably Sassoon and Edmund Blunden. The book
described the author's unhappy time at school, the horrors of war and the end
of his first marriage. With Riding Graves collaborated on a number of
literary projects, but their personal relationship was undermined by
infidelities. The relationship disintegrated by the end of the 1930s. 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. Graves
considered himself primarily a poet. He was recognized early in his career as
a poet who wrote poetry in gloomy, late-Romantic style. His later poetry
dealt mainly with love, birth and death, expressed within the mythological
framework. In the 1940s Graves became interested in myths and history. He was
influenced by a number of the 19th-and early 20th-century scholars, such as
James Frazier, J.J. Bachofen, Jane Harrison, and Margaret Murray. From
1961 to 1966 Graves was a professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. He
wrote several autobiographical works, essays, and carried out Greek and Latin
translations. Graves was a close friend of T.E. Lawrence and published in
1927 Lawrence's biography. Among his non-fiction is two volumes of THE GREEK
MYTHS (1955) and THE NAZARENE GOSPEL RESTROED (1953, with J. Podro). Graves's
later works often challenged academic and popular conventions, emphasizing
the value of mythology and poetry over science and technology. |
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