Volume 30, Number 13 · August 18, 1983
Graves and Goddesses
By Ian Hamilton
Robert Graves: His Life and Work
by Martin Seymour-Smith
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 609 pp., $22.50
In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves, 1914-1946
edited by Paul O'Prey
Hutchinson (London), 371 pp., £12.95
Robert Graves is in many ways the most British of poets, but Britain has never fully warmed to him. In spite of his stoutly traditional meters and his gruff military demeanor, Graves has always been thought of as a bit unsound. It is not just that he chooses to live on a Spanish island, or that he has been thoroughly beastly about Auden. Nor is it simply a hangover from the 1930s when he and Laura Riding used to mount almost weekly guerrilla strikes against the bosses of the British poetry scene. No, the real suspicion is that throughout a rather well-constructed literary career, Graves has carried with him a faint whiff of the bogus. His famous intransigence and aloofness have often seemed to have their roots in an eager-to-be-wounded vanity. His White Goddess theories (although hugely popular with hard-line feminists) are mad enough to be seen as a pious concealment of pensionable lusts. And his dictums on the subject of inspiration (he believes that poets can only write decently if they are in a state of trance) have sometimes looked like the wish fulfillment of a poet whose most 'passionate' work is essentially cold-hearted and literary.
Review, 5115 words
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