A short life of the author
Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist, translator, and classical scholar who was one of the most prolific, versatile, and stubbornly independent writers of the twentieth century. He regarded himself primarily as a poet, but he is remembered equally for his prose — a war memoir, two historical novels, and a work of mythographic speculation that defies conventional classification.
The First World War
Graves was born in Wimbledon, London, to a half-Irish, half-German family (his mother was Amalie von Ranke, a descendant of the historian Leopold von Ranke). He was educated at Charterhouse, where he formed a close friendship with the mountaineer George Mallory, and enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers immediately after the outbreak of war in 1914.
He served on the Western Front, was wounded at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 so severely that he was reported dead — his parents received an official telegram of condolence — and he recovered to return to the front. His wartime friendship with Siegfried Sassoon was one of the defining literary relationships of the war.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
Graves’s war memoir is one of the essential books of the twentieth century — a vivid, sardonic, deliberately unsentimental account of public school, trench warfare, shell shock, and the impossibility of returning to normal civilian life. The title announced Graves’s intention to leave England (which he did, settling in Majorca in 1929 and living there, with interruptions, for the rest of his life) and to put behind him the entire apparatus of English social and literary convention.
The book was controversial on publication — Sassoon was furious about his portrayal, and several of Graves’s anecdotes were challenged as inaccurate — but it has endured as one of the finest accounts of the war, alongside Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War.
I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1934)
Graves’s two Claudius novels are his most commercially successful works and among the greatest historical novels in the English language. Written in the form of a secret autobiography by the Roman Emperor Claudius — the stammering, limping scholar whom everyone underestimated and who survived the murderous politics of the Julio-Claudian dynasty to become emperor — the novels bring imperial Rome to life with a combination of meticulous historical research and vivid, modern-sounding prose.
The novels were adapted into a celebrated BBC television serial (1976), starring Derek Jacobi, which remains one of the finest literary adaptations in television history.
The White Goddess (1948)
Graves’s most idiosyncratic and influential work is The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, which argues that all true poetry derives from the worship of a primal goddess figure — the White Goddess of birth, love, and death — and that the history of Western civilisation has been a long decline from matriarchal goddess-worship to patriarchal rationalism.
The book is part comparative mythology, part literary criticism, part autobiography (Graves’s theory of the Muse was intimately connected to his own romantic relationships with younger women), and part inspired fantasy. Academic scholars have dismantled its historical claims, but poets have been inspired by it — Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and many others acknowledged its influence.
The Greek Myths (1955)
Graves’s retelling and interpretation of Greek mythology — published as a two-volume Penguin reference work — remains one of the most widely read books on the subject. His retellings are lucid and compelling; his interpretations, which apply the theories of The White Goddess to each myth, are controversial but stimulating.
Poetry
Graves published over fifty collections of poetry between 1916 and 1975. His verse is formal, passionate, and intensely personal — much of it addressed to the successive women who served as his Muse. His love poems are among the finest in the language: “She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep,” “Counting the Beats,” “The Cool Web,” and “A Slice of Wedding Cake” demonstrate a mastery of lyric form that places him alongside Yeats and Hardy.
He was consistently hostile to modernism — he disliked Eliot, despised Pound, and had no patience with experimental verse — and his traditionalism cost him critical attention during the decades when modernism dominated academic taste.
Legacy
Graves is one of those writers whose reputation has never quite settled. He is too various for easy classification: a war poet, a historical novelist, a mythographer, a love poet, a classical scholar, a literary critic, and a polemicist. His best work — Goodbye to All That, the Claudius novels, The White Goddess, and the finest poems — is of the highest quality.
Collecting Graves
Goodbye to All That (1929, Jonathan Cape) in first edition is the primary Graves collectible — the true first issue (with the Sassoon poem included, later removed) is rare and valuable ($2,000–$10,000). I, Claudius (1934, Arthur Barker) in first edition with dust jacket is also highly sought. Graves published prolifically and his poetry collections in limited editions are collected by specialists.