Robert Graves


Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July, 1895 – 7 December, 1985) was an English poet, scholar, and novelist. During his long life, he produced more than 140 works. He was the son of the Anglo-Irish writer Alfred Perceval Graves and Amalie von Ranke. The historian Leopold von Ranke was his mother's uncle. He was the brother of the author Charles Patrick Graves.

Graves considered himself a poet first and foremost. His poems, together with his innovative interpretation of the Greek Myths, his memoir of the First World war, Goodbye to All That, and his historical study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, have never been out of print. He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius, The Golden Fleece and Count Belisarius. He was also a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular today for their clarity and entertaining style.

Biography

Early life and WWI

Born in Wimbledon, Graves received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon and Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. However, the prospect of spending another four years studying Latin and Greek did not appeal to the nineteen-year-old Graves, and with the outbreak of World War I he enlisted almost immediately in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (RWF). He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916, but later tried to suppress his war poetry. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he received such serious injuries that his family was informed of his death. However, he recovered, at the cost of permanent damage to his lungs, and, after a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England, despite his efforts to return to the front.

In 1917, Graves played an important part in saving his fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon from a court-martial after the latter went absent without leave and wrote to his commanding officer denouncing the war. The two officers had become firm friends while serving with the RWF.

Graves's biographies document the story well, and it is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Sassoon himself remarked upon a "heavy sexual element" within it, an observation supported by the sentimental nature of much of the surviving correspondence between the two men. Through Sassoon, Graves also encountered Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of twelve Apostle spoons".

Following his marriage and the end of World War I, Graves eventually entered St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business soon failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children, and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split up with his wife under highly emotional circumstances (at one point Riding attempted suicide) before leaving to live with Riding in Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928); both had great influence on modern literary criticism, particularly new criticism.

Literary Career

In 1927, he also published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T. E. Lawrence. Goodbye to All That (1929, revised by him and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Siegfried Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complex and compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in the sequel Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.

Graves and Riding had been forced to leave Majorca in 1936 due to the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, they moved to the United States and took lodging in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Their volatile relationship was described in non-fiction by Richard Perceval Graves in Robert Graves: 1927-1940, The Years with Laura and T.S. Matthews' book Jacks or Better (1977), and also was the basis for Miranda Seymour's fictionalized novel The Summer of '39 (1998).

After returning to England, Graves began a new relationship with Beryl Hodge, then the wife of Alan Hodge, his collaborator on The Long Week-End (1941) and The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943; republished in 1947 as The Use and Abuse of the English Language). In 1946 he and his new wife Beryl re-established a home in Deya, Majorca. 1946 also saw the publication of the historical novel King Jesus. He published the controversial The White Goddess in 1948 and went on to a series of affairs and lesser amours with his "muses". He turned to science fiction with "Seven Days in New Crete" (1949), and in 1953 he published The Nazarene Gospel Restored with Joshua Podro. In 1955, he published his version of The Greek Myths, which continues to dominate the English-language market for mythography despite its poor reputation among classicists[1] - a reputation that is perhaps unsurprising given the unconventional nature of his interpretations and his own open and scathing opinion of literary scholars.[2] In 1956, he published a volume of short stories Catacrok! Mostly Stories, Mostly Funny. In 1961 he became professor of poetry at Oxford, a post he held until 1966.

Graves died in December 1985 at the age of 90, following a long illness and gradual mental degeneration. He and Beryl are buried in the small churchyard on the hill in Deia, overlooking the sea on the Northwest coast of Majorca.

Graves had eight children: Jenny, David, Catherine (who married nuclear scientist Clifford Dalton) and Sam with Nancy Nicholson, and William, Lucia (herself a translator), Juan and Tomas with Beryl Graves.[3]

Bibliography

Poetry

Fiction

Other works

External links

Citations