The Love Poetry of Robert Graves

RICHARD HOFFPAUIR The Love Poetry of Robert Graves In this century, which 'is stingy with love poems or poems about love," Robert Graves has emerged as the pre-eminent love poet. It was in large part his cantankerous independence, his refusal to be moved by literary movements, his defiance of easy classification within the modern terms of acceptance, that made it possible for him to leave us such a large body of first-rate love poems. He avoided, or, more accurately, worked his way through and beyond the disillusionments and cynicisms so cornmanin the poets of the decades between the wars. The vogue of Bohemianism, which he and Alan Hodges in The Long Weekend so nicely characterized as 'a gay disorderliness of life, cheerful bad manners, and no fixed hours or sexual standards," urged its poets into an emphasis on the failures, discouragements, and isolations of 'modern' desire. lf the Great War intensified the questioning of the virtue of courage and the aims of honour, the years that followed broadened the assault, bringing further into doubt the absoluteness and reasonableness of many more moral categories and distinctions, including love and lust. Graves was one of the few who stood against that spirit of the age, reinvesting his faith in creative possibility, in claims of fullness and fulfilment in human love, in the very capacity for that highest form of human sympathy and most complex form of self-sacrifice. Graves himself commented to a visitor to Deya in 1970 that 'he only ever wrote love poems.'J With his death and the end of his seemingly endless revisions, we can now more securely perhaps place him not only in the poetic history of the century but also in the tradition of modern love poetry. Behind my commentary on Graves's love poetry is a general agreement with his 1983 biographer, Martin Seymour-Smith, that the love theme, present from the very beginning, only emerges 'uninhibitedly and robustly,' with a confident and mature tenderness, in the volume he published in 1946, Poems 1938-45, in those poems written long after his divorce from Nancy Nicholson, as he freed himself from Laura Riding's influence, and as he found a stable relationship with Beryl Pritchard, who became his second wife' There is nothing new, of course, in singling out love poetry as the central achievement of Graves's extremely wide-ranging and varied career. Such a claim is now almost a critical commonplace? It is the UNIV!RSfrv OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1988 THE LOVE POETRY OF ROBERT GRAVES 423 grounds of that claim that Iwish to challenge. The critics who have tried to defend Graves's reputation as a love poet have tended to do one of two things: to concentrate on the (usually pre-1938) poems centrally concerned with the problems of sex, what Ronald Gaskell calls 'the savagery oflove,6 (other examplesare Michael Kirkham, who finds most impressive those poems 'in which the contrary pulls of romantic aspiration and realistic awareness' are the strongest, or George Stade, who finds 'more powerful' the poems on lust);' or, to see the World War II love poems as simply preparing the way for and prefiguring the full-blown matriarchal myth Graves developed in the "940S (for instance, J.M. Cohen, W.H. Auden, Douglas Day, James Mehoke, and Katherine Snipes).8 That second, and by far most popular, view complements both the persistent contention that Graves is, despite his discipline and his reasonableness, essentially a romantic (Patrick Keane brings this to a head in A Wild Civility [1980] - I will have more to say of Keane and this problem later) and the insistent desire to distinguish divisions in Graves's career. Most detect three such phases: a period of conventional romanticism ("9"6-26), followed by the years of Riding's influence (called a period of 'conventional skepticism' by Stade and of 'negatively classical restraint' by Cohen) from 1926 to "938, then the new, tougher romanticism of the post-1938 period dominated by the White Goddess. Kirkham suggests a fourth phase, from "959, in which Graves celebrates the Black Goddess of Wisdom. Such convenient schema encourage one to overlook...