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Robert Graves and The White Goddess: Chatterton Lecture On Poetry

Fran Brearton

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 131, 2004 Lectures

This lecture discusses The White Goddess, a novel written by Robert Graves that was first published in May 1948. It is an intellectual and difficult book that has a toehold in many academic ... More

This lecture discusses The White Goddess, a novel written by Robert Graves that was first published in May 1948. It is an intellectual and difficult book that has a toehold in many academic disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, and Celtic studies. As an author, Graves has been described as the ‘bard’ of ‘an alternative society’ and as a ‘a unique figure in British literary life’. The lecture determines that The White Goddess can be both a help and a hindrance when it comes to looking at Graves' life and work. It also presents the literary techniques Graves used in the novel.Less

God (And Goddess) Parents

Ronald Hutton

in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

This chapter examines the religious and spiritual ideas of selected individuals who flourished in the first half of the 20th century. The distinctions are, first, that their best-known work was ... More

This chapter examines the religious and spiritual ideas of selected individuals who flourished in the first half of the 20th century. The distinctions are, first, that their best-known work was produced slightly later — between 1900 and 1950 — and, second, that they had a direct and obvious influence upon modern pagan witchcraft and have been acknowledged by many modern witches as sources of inspiration. These individuals include Aleister Crowley, Violet Firth, Robert Graves, and Margaret Murray.Less

The Rebirth of Comedy, 1942–1949

in Knossos & the Prophets of Modernism

This chapter reviews the Minoan adventures of Hilda Doolittle and Robert Graves during and immediately after the Second World War. Doolittle and Graves were responsible for shepherding the more ... More

This chapter reviews the Minoan adventures of Hilda Doolittle and Robert Graves during and immediately after the Second World War. Doolittle and Graves were responsible for shepherding the more Dionysian fragments of Arthur Evans's Cretan pacifism across the apocalyptic wasteland of the Second World War. The Cretan material from “The Majic Ring” is united with the Psyche symbol that Doolittle borrowed from Arthur Evans to create an archetype of female defiance in the face of the insanity of war. “The Majic Ring” explores of one of the most painful, recurring themes of Doolittle's life. Seven Days in New Crete is founded upon a premise that Graves had begun to delineate in a 1937 antiwar manifesto. Doolittle and Graves survived their brushes with death only to find themselves enduring another global conflagration, and also recreated Minoan Crete as the goddess-worshipping Atlantis that must surely have existed before humans invented war.Less

Ovid in Defeat? On the reception of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris

Genevieve Liveley

in The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris

This chapter focuses on a single poem from twentieth century poet Robert Graves to explore Graves' close critical engagement with Ovid's Ars and Remedia – an engagement that, on a more general level, ... More

This chapter focuses on a single poem from twentieth century poet Robert Graves to explore Graves' close critical engagement with Ovid's Ars and Remedia – an engagement that, on a more general level, comments on the challenges of reading (and misreading) Ovid's poetry over the past millennium.Less

Robert Graves at Troy, Marathon, and the End of Sandy Road: War Poems at a Classical Distance?

Tom Palaima

in Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition

Robert Graves’s war poems use an ironic distancing effect that distinguishes him within the long tradition of war poets from Homer, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, Archilochus, Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil to ... More

Robert Graves’s war poems use an ironic distancing effect that distinguishes him within the long tradition of war poets from Homer, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, Archilochus, Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil to the soldier poets of World War I. Graves’s rhetorical stance is linked to symptoms of post-traumatic stress developing in his childhood and intensified by his near-death wounding in World War I. Graves writes war poems in the clear, spare, and low-toned style of other soldiers and veterans like Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell. But he rarely forces readers to take in emotionally intense scenes, because he believes that those unbaptized in the suicidal sacrament of war cannot understand its realities. Graves’s cynicism about the capacities of power figures even to see the truth underlies the intellectualized satire in his translation of Homer’s Iliad and his poem about the Battle of Marathon, ‘The Persian Version’.Less

Freedom to Invent: Graves’s Iconoclastic Approach to Antiquity

Isobel Hurst

in Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition

This chapter examines Robert Graves’s poetry in the context of his classical education and his idiosyncratic responses to the canons of classical and English literature. Graves adopts a tone of ... More

This chapter examines Robert Graves’s poetry in the context of his classical education and his idiosyncratic responses to the canons of classical and English literature. Graves adopts a tone of humorous detachment in his poetry, and values writers such as Ovid. The Odyssey is an important influence for Graves, who interprets Homer as a satirist. In his reinterpretations of Greek myth, Graves celebrates his freedom to supply missing details from his imagination rather than having to adhere to scholarly standards of evidence, and creates alternative versions that critique the treatment of love and relationships between the sexes in patriarchal mythology from an unorthodox perspective.Less

The Anger of Achilles: A Prize-Winning ‘Epic for Radio’ by Robert Graves

Amanda Wrigley

in Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition

This chapter explores the varied scholarly, critical, and public engagements with The Anger of Achilles, Robert Graves’s adaptation of Homer’s Iliad. It was a huge commercial success in book form, ... More

This chapter explores the varied scholarly, critical, and public engagements with The Anger of Achilles, Robert Graves’s adaptation of Homer’s Iliad. It was a huge commercial success in book form, often reprinted following its first publication in 1959. In the 1960s Graves vigorously pursued stage and film performances of the text, but while these plans continually faltered, it was in repeated performances on BBC Radio’s Home Service and Third Programme that The Anger of Achilles reached its largest audiences and attained its greatest critical success, with the award in 1965 of the Prix Italia for an outstanding literary and dramatic work for radio. This study emphasizes the fact that Graves’ creative adaptations of antiquity held enormous popular appeal, not only for readers but also for hundreds of thousands of listeners who may not, in the main, have been schooled in Classics.Less

Robert Graves as Historical Novelist: Count Belisarius—Genesis, Gender, and Truth

Shaun Tougher

in Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition

This chapter focuses on Robert Graves’ less-celebrated historical novel Count Belisarius (1938), an account of the career of the general who led the reconquest of the west for the emperor Justinian ... More

This chapter focuses on Robert Graves’ less-celebrated historical novel Count Belisarius (1938), an account of the career of the general who led the reconquest of the west for the emperor Justinian in the sixth century AD. The chapter explores its genesis (suggested to Graves by T. E. Lawrence), the theme of gender in the novel (represented by the use of a eunuch narrator), and Graves’s stated concern for historical truth (undercut by his inclusion of the story of the blinding of Belisarius by the emperor and his subsequent begging for alms on the streets of Constantinople). Despite the perceived problem of the character of Belisarius in the novel (as a one-dimensional noble hero and an innocent victim), the novel sheds much light on Graves’s life and concerns, such as his relationships with men and women, his interest in war, his need for money, his historical sensibilities and his public reputation.Less

‘Essentially a Moral Problem’: Robert Graves and the Politics of the Plain Prose Translation

Philip Burton

in Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition

This chapter investigates why Robert Graves so consistently and explicitly adopts a ‘plain-prose’ translation technique even when translating authors as varied as Apuleius, Lucan, Suetonius, and ... More

This chapter investigates why Robert Graves so consistently and explicitly adopts a ‘plain-prose’ translation technique even when translating authors as varied as Apuleius, Lucan, Suetonius, and Homer. It considers Graves’s statements on the role of the translator (traditionally seen as a secondary figure, dependent on the individual genius of the original author), and compares these with his view of poets (such as himself) as inspired devotees of the White Goddess. A partial explanation is offered in Graves’s self-positioning vis à vis other translators, such as Samuel Butler and T. E. Lawrence. Particular attention is given to his insistent appeal to Irish and Welsh traditions of poetry, and to his paradoxical status in the 1950s as both established literary figure and self-proclaimed outsider.Less

Aftermath of War: Coterie (1919–21), New Coterie (1925–7), Robert Graves and The Owl (1919–23)

Andrew Thacker

in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955

This chapter discusses the histories of three magazines that ran from 1919 to 1923: Coterie, New Coterie, and The Owl. Coterie was a classic ‘little magazine’ of the period after the First World War, ... More

This chapter discusses the histories of three magazines that ran from 1919 to 1923: Coterie, New Coterie, and The Owl. Coterie was a classic ‘little magazine’ of the period after the First World War, publishing six issues from May 1919 to Winter 1920–1 before folding. It was relaunched as New Coterie, running from November 1925 to the Autumn of 1927. Robert Graves's The Owl was, in many ways, much more of an inward-looking coterie production than Coterie, being funded and co-edited by his father-in-law, William Nicholson, and his friend W. J. Turner, and containing work by Nicholson, Graves, and Graves's wife, Nancy Nicholson. The chapter examines both the complexity of the cultural formations associated with Coterie and The Owl, and the nature of the cultural environment for magazine publication in the years immediately following the First World War.Less

‘It’s readable all right, but it’s not history’: Robert Graves’s Claudius Novels and the Impossibility of Historical Fiction

Andrew Bennett

in Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition

Robert Graves’s Claudius novels bring to prominence the structural tension within the genre of the historical novel between the empirical on the one hand and literary invention on the other. Graves ... More

Robert Graves’s Claudius novels bring to prominence the structural tension within the genre of the historical novel between the empirical on the one hand and literary invention on the other. Graves equates poetry with the non-empirical and non-historical, but figures prose fiction as empirical, linguistically confined, and historically specific. He therefore insists on a full historicity for his novels in order to assert the authenticity of his narrative and to confirm the soundness of his scholarship. Reinforcing an opposition of literature to history that originates in Aristotle’s Poetics, Graves emphasizes the novels’ historicity at the expense of their literary value. In doing so, he resists a conception of the literary as the undecidable combination of the singular and general envisaged by critics from Aristotle to Jacques Derrida. The novels achieve a kind of ersatz historiography but thereby largely forgo the rhetorically inventive and narratively innovative resources offered by prose fiction.Less

“The Curious Christmas Truce”: The First World War and the Christmas Truce, 1920–1959

Terri Blom Crocker

in The Christmas Truce: Myth, Memory, and the First World War

Works from the interwar and immediate post–World War II period, when everyone in Britain was supposed to be thoroughly disillusioned with the conflict, demonstrate that in fact the narrative of the ... More

Works from the interwar and immediate post–World War II period, when everyone in Britain was supposed to be thoroughly disillusioned with the conflict, demonstrate that in fact the narrative of the war was still at this point hotly disputed, and remained so through the late 1950s. Memoirs, treatises, novels, general histories, and polemics all took different attitudes toward the war, and the truce was an important part of this contested narrative: some dismissed it as a mere curiosity, while others contended that the cease-fire signified an important moral about the conflict.Less

Imaginative visions

Sara Haslam

in Fragmenting Modernism

This chapter introduces the concept of Ford Madox Ford's ‘positive fictions’, and offers a way of reading Ford's dedication to his grandfather as well as to his grandfather's circle (especially the ... More

This chapter introduces the concept of Ford Madox Ford's ‘positive fictions’, and offers a way of reading Ford's dedication to his grandfather as well as to his grandfather's circle (especially the Pre-Raphaelites) that feeds into the content and the visual style of these texts. It also reintroduces the ‘woman question’, focusing on four novels that reconstruct worlds of alternative systems which emanate from the fragmented consciousness of men such as Grimshaw. These novels are The ‘Half Moon’ (1909), Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), The New Humpty Dumpty (1912) and The Young Lovell (1913). In some texts, Ford investigates the contemporary rage/fear in male reactions to women, together with the healing qualities of what Carl Jung termed the female archetypes. Jung's theories, and Robert Graves's writings, are used as part of an illuminatory test of Jung's assertion that ‘our world seems to be dis-infected of witches’, when the world is Ford's positive fictions. These fictions possess roots that mean the multiple perspectives central to modernism often regenerate as well as destroy.Less

Assertibility Conditions, Implicature, and the Question of Semantic Holism: Almost but Not Quite

Jay David Atlas

in Logic, Meaning, and Conversation: Semantical Underdeterminacy, Implicature, and their Interface

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in their work called The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, state that one of the illustrated Principles of Clear Statement involves how ... More

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in their work called The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, state that one of the illustrated Principles of Clear Statement involves how doubt should not exist regarding issues of how long and how much. As such, Graves and Hodge were able to give their opinions about the use of almost and not quite. The use of these two words not only entails the importance of some logical ordering, but also points out that there are certain degrees of success that can be comparable and are utilized on understanding the notion of approximation. This chapter examines the use of conjunctions in the context of contradiction, and includes a discussion about “post-Gricean pragmatics.”Less