Robert Graves

1895–1985

On July 24, 1895, Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, near London. His father,
Alfred Perceval Graves, 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. One of ten children, 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.

In 1913 Graves won a scholarship to continue his studies at St. John's College,
Oxford, but 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, with whom he was to have four children. 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 Graves his reputation as an accomplished
war poet. After meeting the American poet and theorist Laura Riding in 1926,
Graves's poetry underwent a significant transformation. Douglas Day has written
that the "influence of Laura Riding is quite possibly the most important single
element in [Graves's] poetic career: 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. The couple cofounded Seizin Press in 1928 and Epilogue,
a semiannual magazine, in 1935. During that period, he evolved his theory of poetry
as spiritually cathartic to both the poet and the reader. 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. (During the 1970's, the BBC
adapted the novels into an internationally popular television series.)

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. It was in the 1940s, after his break with Riding, that
Graves formulated his personal mythology of the White Goddess. Inspired by late
nineteenth-century studies of matriarchal societies and goddess cults, this
mythology was to pervade all of his later work.

After World War II, Graves returned to Majorca, where he lived with Hodge and
continued to write. By the 1950s, 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 nonfiction, 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.