Robert Graves

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Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a war poet, translator of classics and novelist. During his long life, he wrote over 140 works including an autobiographical account of his time in the First World War – Goodbye to All That.

Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon 24 July 1895 to middle-class parents. His father was a school-master and his mother from an upper-class German family.

He was educated at a series of preparatory schools before gaining a scholarship to Charterhouse. Though an excellent student, life at Charterhouse was tough; he was relatively poor but outspoken; he was also teased for his German connections. In response, he gave an impression of eccentricity and took up poetry and boxing. One of his schoolmasters was George Mallory, who gave Robert an interest in both contemporary literature and mountaineering.

On the outbreak of war in 1914, Graves joined the army, enlisting in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was one of the first poets to publish ‘realistic’ war poetry documenting the life of trench warfare.

Trench stinks of shallow buried dead
Where Tom stands at the periscope,
Tired out. After nine months he’s shed
All fear, all faith, all hate, all hope.

– Robert Graves “Through the Periscope” (1915)

He suffered from shell shock and a dreadful fear of gas attacks. He recalls how he would later be affected by loud bangs or any unusual smell throughout the rest of his life. In 1916, he was badly wounded by shrapnel in the Battle of the Somme. His wound was so bad, he was recorded as having died from his wounds. However, against the odds, he survived but spent the rest of the war in England.

He was close friends with other war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; his relationship with Sassoon developing into a close romantic involvement.

In 1919, he was posted to Northern Ireland. However, on

Following the Armistice on 11th November 1918, Graves resigned his commission and took up his fellowship at St John's College, where he met T. E. Lawrence, who was then at All Souls College. He and Nancy set up a small grocery in Boars Hill to support their growing family, but the business soon failed. Graves carried on attempting to earn money by his writing. In 1926 he accepted a post at Cairo University, but stayed there for only six months with his wife and their four children. The American poet Laura Riding accompanied them.

He published several best selling books, such as Lawrence and the Arabs – a successful biography of his Oxford friend T.E.Lawrence. In 1929 he published a book ‘Goodbye To All That‘ an account of trench warfare and the difficulties of adjusting to life after the war. He writes about his experience of returning from the front.

England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.  (ch. 21)

Goodbye To All That‘ is a stark account of the reality of trench warfare and includes second-hand accounts of German prisoners of war murdered after surrendering. This honesty and openness led to criticism from some quarters.

He also published several classical interpretations of classical poetry, such as The Greek Myths. He took greater liberty with translations trying to capture the poetic spirit rather than a strict translation.

In 1929, his marriage having come to an end, Graves left England with Laura Riding and settled in the mountain village of Deià in Majorca, Spain. There they published a variety of books, especially their poetry, through their Seizin Press. Graves’s commercially successful biography of T. E. Lawrence had appeared in 1927. Goodbye to All That (1929), which also proved a bestseller, aroused considerable controversy, and caused a lasting break with Sassoon. In 1934 he published his classic historical novel I Claudius, another bestseller, followed by Claudius the God (1935).

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 Graves and Riding returned to London, and then moved in 1939 to New Hope, Pennsylvania, where their relationship finally broke down. After returning later that year to England, Graves lived in Devon with Beryl Hodge, wife of Alan Hodge, who collaborated with Graves on various literary projects. In 1946 Graves went back to Majorca with Beryl, and the couple, who had four children, eventually married. Graves published in 1948 The White Goddess, his celebrated ‘historical grammar of poetic myth’ detailing his view of the ‘poetic impulse’; The Greek Myths appeared in 1955.

From 1961 to 1965 Graves was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in 1971 he was made an honorary fellow of St John’s College.

Robert Graves died from heart failure on 7 Dec 1985, aged 90, and is buried at Deià in the small cemetery overlooking the sea. Towards the end of his life, he suffered from a frail memory and stopped writing. He was the last surviving war poet, commemorated at Westminster Abbey just a month before his death.

Selected Poems by ROBERT GRAVES

  1. Counting The Beats

    by ROBERT GRAVES

    You, love, and I,
    (He whispers) you and I,
    And if no more than only you and I
    What care you or I ?

    Counting the beats,
    Counting the slow heart beats,
    The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
    Wakeful they lie.

    Cloudless day,
    Night, and a cloudless day,
    Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
    From a bitter sky.

    Where shall we be,
    (She whispers) where shall we be,
    When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
    Who were you and I ?

    Not there but here,
    (He whispers) only here,
    As we are, here, together, now and here,
    Always you and I.

    Counting the beats,
    Counting the slow heart beats,
    The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
    Wakeful they lie.

  2. The Kiss

    by ROBERT GRAVES

    Are you shaken, are you stirred
    By a whisper of love,
    Spellbound to a word
    Does Time cease to move,
    Till her calm grey eye
    Expands to a sky
    And the clouds of her hair
    Like storms go by?

    Then the lips that you have kissed

    Turn to frost and fire,
    And a white-steaming mist
    Obscures desire:
    So back to their birth
    Fade water, air, earth,
    And the First Power moves
    Over void and dearth.

    Is that Love? no, but Death,
    A passion, a shout,

    The deep in-breath,
    The breath roaring out,
    And once that is flown,
    You must lie alone,
    Without hope, without life,
    Poor flesh, sad bone.

  3. A Valentine

    by ROBERT GRAVES

    The hunter to the husbandman
    Pays tribute since our love began,
    And to love-loyalty dedicates
    The phantom kills he meditates.
    Let me embrace, embracing you,
    Beauty of other shape and hue,
    Odd glinting graces of which none
    Shone more than candle to your sun;
    Your well-kissed hand was beckoning me
    In unfamiliar imagery.

    Smile your forgiveness: each bright ghost
    Dives in love's glory and is lost
    Yielding your comprehensive pride
    A homage, even to suicide.

  4. Dew-Drop And Diamond

    by ROBERT GRAVES

    The difference between you and her
    (whom I to you did once prefer)
    Is clear enough to settle:
    She like a diamond shone, but you
    Shine like an early drop of dew
    Poised on a red rose petal.

    The dew-drop carries in its eye
    Mountain and forest, sea and sky,
    With every change of weather;

    Contrariwise, a diamond splits
    The prospect into idle bits
    That none can piece together.

  5. The Naked And The Nude

    by ROBERT GRAVES

    For me, the naked and the nude
    (By lexicographers construed
    As synonyms that should express
    The same deficiency of dress
    Or shelter) stand as wide apart
    As love from lies, or truth from art.

    Lovers without reproach will gaze
    On bodies naked and ablaze;
    The Hippocratic eye will see
    In nakedness, anatomy;
    And naked shines the Goddess when
    She mounts her lion among men.

    The nude are bold, the nude are sly
    To hold each treasonable eye.
    While draping by a showman's trick
    Their dishabille in rhetoric,
    They grin a mock-religious grin
    Of scorn at those of naked skin.

    The naked, therefore, who compete
    Against the nude may know defeat;
    Yet when they both together tread
    The briary pastures of the dead,
    By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
    How naked go the sometime nude!

  6. Symptoms of Love by Robert Graves

    by ROBERT GRAVES

    Love is universal migraine,
    A bright stain on the vision
    Blotting out reason.

    Symptoms of true love
    Are leanness, jealousy,
    Laggard dawns;

    Are omens and nightmares -
    Listening for a knock,
    Waiting for a sign:

    For a touch of her fingers
    In a darkened room,
    For a searching look.

    Take courage, lover!
    Could you endure such pain
    At any hand but hers?

 
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