The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons

PREFACE

xi P R E FAC E The Argument Robert Graves lived an exciting life. Before he was twenty, he was an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Before he was thirty, he had fought in the Great War with honor, was familiar with the most important political and literary figures of his time, and had written poetry and critical studies that had brought him fame if not money. Then, in the midst of personal scandal , he abandoned England and moved to a rural village on Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands. Forced to leave by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was rootless until he returned in 1950. By then he had written historical novels of great distinction and popularity, and had contributed two phrases to Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations: ‘‘Good-Bye To All That’’ and ‘‘The White Goddess.’’ He had renewed his friendship with T. S. Eliot, who published The White Goddess. He had also gained the animosity of Ezra Pound, which he returned in kind. W. H. Auden had become an admirer; Graves would follow him as Oxford Professor of Poetry . From the time of his return to Mallorca until his death, Graves constantly received the adulation of visitors both unknown and known to all the world. Schemes were offered to him by financiers, media moguls, and crooks. He raised two families of four children each, intriguing and consequential families. His writing might never have gone beyond memoirs and a fictionalized life. His own everyday life (exciting as it was) only entered his writing in the most oblique ways. That life has so fascinated his critics that they have worried at it for years, virtually to the exclusion of the writings. Yet no one would be interested in Robert Graves if he had not been among those who shaped twentieth-century literature. What follows here is a study of the birth and development of Graves’s poetic self and talent, which were inseparable and often not evident in the day-to-day life made public by his biographers. Graves very early made his poetry into an experience of its own, one informed by his psychologi- t h e e a r ly p o e t ry of r o b e rt g r av e s xii cal and spiritual discoveries. These began with the experience of World War I and his wounds, not only those which almost killed him but also those which caused what he called his ‘‘war neurosis.’’ Such disorientation , hauntings, and compulsiveness were recorded by innumerable writers and artists, from Hemingway and cummings to Sassoon and Graves among the Allies. Their opponents told similar tales of being estranged from life without war while being terrified by war, of being brave and afraid. What makes these writers different from one another is not their experiences, but their reactions to those experiences. For Graves, the trauma inflicted by war opened a door into the unconscious . Though not an exceptional occurrence, since World War I gave birth to the widespread practice of modern psychiatry, what Graves found within made unusual sense of what was without: love, passion, violence, unpredictability. His writing, especially the poetry, records and celebrates his accommodating such powers. In so doing, he rejected the essential components of the Western idea of reality: reason and predictability, the heritage of Aristotle and the glory that was Greece. Unpredictability, especially , he made a characteristic of the White Goddess, deifying what he could not control. The void was filled by his respect for his own life as it was given to him by woman or by a woman, initially his wife Nancy Nicholson. He made her responsible for his health and sanity. In time, he would see both himself and his devotion to a woman as necessary for his spiritual awareness and, unquestionably, for his poetry. Woman as muse was representative of an awesome and almost indescribable power. The spirit that informs his early poetry is the unfamiliar, the other. In the forties, he gave the spirit a name, ‘‘the White Goddess,’’ though in a poem published in 1924, ‘‘A History,’’ he called this spirit ‘‘the death-white Fay.’’ Graves saw the feminine as the fundamental force in life, both in his personal life and in the life of the culture. He would claim matriarchy as the basic form of society, the goddess as the all-powerful deity, and his life as poet and scholar driven by the purpose...