Robert Graves
born
July 24/26, 1895, London
died Dec. 7, 1985, Deyá, Majorca, Spain
English
poet, novelist, critic, and classical scholar
who carried on many of the formal traditions of
English verse in a period of experimentation.
His more than 120 books also include a notable
historical novel, I, Claudius (1934); an
autobiographical classic of World War I,
Good-Bye to All That (1929; rev. ed. 1957); and
erudite, controversial studies in mythology.
As a
student at Charterhouse School, London, young
Graves began to write poetry; he continued this
while serving as a British officer at the
western front during World War I, writing three
books of verse during 1916–17. The horror of
trench warfare was a crucial experience in his
life: he was severely wounded in 1916 and
remained deeply troubled by his war experiences
for at least a decade. Graves’s mental conflicts
during the 1920s were exacerbated by an
increasingly unhappy marriage that ended in
divorce. A new acceptance of his own nature, in
which sexual love and dread seemed to exist in
close proximity, appeared in his verse after he
met Laura Riding, an American poet, who
accompanied him to the island of Majorca, Spain,
in 1929 and with whom he was associated for 13
years.
The
success of Graves’s Good-Bye to All That, war
memoirs notable for their unadorned grimness,
enabled him to make his permanent home on
Majorca, an island whose simplicity had not yet
been altered by tourism. Graves’s novel I,
Claudius is an engaging first-person narrative
purportedly written by the Roman emperor
Claudius as he chronicles the personalities and
machinations of the Julio-Claudian line during
the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula.
This work was followed by other historical
novels dealing with ancient Mediterranean
civilizations and including Claudius the God
(1934), which extends Claudius’ narrative to his
own reign as emperor; Count Belisarius (1938), a
sympathetic study of the great and martyred
general of the Byzantine Empire; and The Golden
Fleece (1944; U.S. title Hercules, My Shipmate).
Graves’s researches for The Golden Fleece led
him into a wide-ranging study of myths and to
what was his most controversial scholarly work,
The White Goddess; A Historical Grammar of
Poetic Myth (1948). In it the author argues the
existence of an all-important religion, rooted
in the remote past but continuing into the
Christian Era, based on the worship of a
goddess.
Graves
began before 1914 as a typical Georgian poet,
but his war experiences and the difficulties of
his personal life gave his later poetry a much
deeper and more painful note. He remained a
traditionalist rather than a modernist, however,
in his emphasis on meter and clear meaning in
his verse. Graves’s sad love poems are regarded
as the finest produced in the English language
during the 20th century, along with those of
W.B. Yeats.
Graves
was elected professor of poetry at the
University of Oxford in 1961 and served there
until 1966. His Collected Poems appeared in
1948, with revisions in 1955, 1959, 1961, and
1975. His controversial translation of The
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyàm, with Omar Ali-Shah,
appeared in 1967. His own later views on poetry
can be found in The Crowning Privilege (1955)
and Oxford Addresses on Poetry (1962).
