The Poetry of Graves by Robert Graves

First published:Over the Brazier, 1916; Fairies and Fusiliers, 1917; Country Sentiment, 1920; The Pier Glass, 1921; Whipperginny, 1923; Mock Beggar Hall, 1924; Welchman’s Hose, 1925; The Marmosite’s Miscellany, 1925; Poems, 1914-1926, 1927; Poems, 1929, 1929; Poems, 1926-1930, 1931; Collected Poems, 1938; No More Ghosts, 1940; Poems, 1938-1945, 1946; Collected Poems, 1914-1947, 1948; Poems and Satires, 1951; Collected Poems, 1955; Collected Poems, 1959; More Poems, 1961; The Penny Fiddle, 1962; New Poems, 1963; Man Does, Woman Is, 1964

Critical Evaluation:

Like the weather, the reputations of even the best poets are subject to change, and the middle years of our century have revealed in a somewhat different light of appraisal and judgment a group of writers whose places, only a short time back as literary generations are measured, seemed fixed and final in the critical canon.

The reason for this change in poetic climate is not hard to determine. Twenty-five years ago the air was expectant with the promise of a bright new day in English poetry. Yeats had achieved the full stature of his later period. Eliot had taken an affirmative stand in ASH WEDNESDAY and was at work on his FOUR QUARTETS. Pound had broken a trail into new terrains of history and art. Auden and others of his generation were stripping drabness and false sentiment from the paraphernalia of ordinary life, bringing witty new insights and values to the contemporary experience. Dylan Thomas had already brought his passionate sensibility to bear on the joined inner and outer worlds and was hymning his findings with full-throated orchestration. All this has now changed, however, for the anticipated new day proved only a false dawn. Yeats and Thomas are dead, the latter with the promise of his early work unfulfilled. Eliot turned playwright before his death. Pound has added to the Cantos without extending his range or influence. The poets of the 1930’s are still honored, but their occasional thin volumes no longer generate excitement in either readers or critics. As for the young apprentice poets on the English scene, their muted voices can scarcely be heard among the strident echoes of our time.

But this situation has produced one good result. Criticism is now willing to take a second look at some poets previously taken for granted or disregarded—the otherworldly lyricism of Walter de la Mare, for example, and the ebullient, idiosyncratic, but always brilliant performance of Robert Graves. Certainly the latest edition of his COLLECTED POEMS reveals a poet who makes greater demands on our attention than do many contemporary writers of more gilded reputations.

Some poets outlast their periods, others their public. The fact that Robert Graves has done neither is easily explained. During his long career—his first book of verse appeared in 1916—he has never allied himself with any movement or group, never cultivated an eclectic or school style; consequently, he had nothing to lose when critical fashions changed. Also, he has never mistaken current popularity for lasting fame or courted the favor of his readers. A veteran of many hard-fought literary skirmishes, he has battled for only one cause, his own integrity as a poet.

The means by which he has maintained his hard-bitten, roughly achieved literary independence help us in understanding both the tart native flavor of his best verse and the defensive attitude he sometimes assumes toward his poorest.

Graves has often stressed the fact that he is not addicted to any poetic “school.” One should not believe, then, that his interest in unusual items of medieval literature makes him automatically a writer of romantic temper. There is in Graves’s poetry, and has been since World War I, a strong element of the satirical, evidence of dissatisfaction with many aspects of the world around him—the times, war, England, even himself. Perhaps even the years he resided outside England seem further evidence of such inner dissatisfaction, the kind that is evident in “To Lucia at Birth,” a sonnet written relatively late in life.

The earnest thought, the hope that the individual can resist changes which will make him or her conform to the world, instead of resolutely maintaining individuality, recurs in the last stanza of “At the Savoy Chapel,” a poem written on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage in 1945.

Despite the ever-recurring satire in the poems directed against the world as it is, in poems as diverse as “Vain and Careless,” “Angry Samson,” “Sergeant-Major Money,” “Down, Wanton, Down,” and “The Fallen Tower of Siloam,” there is also a touch of true sentiment in Graves’s poems. It appears sometimes as if the facade of the poet were stripped away temporarily, so that one can see the man and note that the poet and the man, contrary to the traditions of poetry, are not one and the same. In “Coronation Address,” for example, Graves writes in the first person, describing the reactions of a family, particularly the husband’s, to the death of Queen Victoria, an incident that may well have a historical basis in the poet’s own life. A five-year-old boy brings in the edition of the Times telling of the monarch’s death, news which sends tears rolling down the father’s cheeks. In response to his wife’s remark that the queen was, after all, only a woman, the husband retorts that to honor the king is honorable, but to have a queen to serve is lovely. He adds that he hopes his son, the five-year-old, may someday serve a queen. The poem closes with an admonition to Elizabeth II to think well of her great-great-grandmother, who so earned the love of her subjects.

Graves is really at his best when least abstruse. The simpler, explicit style, the homely yet well-chosen idiom of a poem like “Recalling War,” which looks back to World War I from the distance of a score of years, is poetically indicative of the poet at his best. In this poem Graves captures with extraordinary brilliance the attitudes of young men toward war’s activity and their attitudes in later years as they remember what happened.

Graves began as a young poet mingling country sentiment and personal war experiences, but over the years the war poems have almost completely disappeared from his collections and his country themes have been reshaped to show the symbolic particularities of things. Meanwhile he has been formulating his own theories on the origin and nature of poetry, as set forth in THE WHITE GODDESS, a highly controversial examination into the sources of poetic being and truth in the buried anthropological past. At least a third of the poems now collected have their roots in his theory of poetic myth, either directly in the love poems or indirectly in his ballad themes and his adaptations from the ancient Gaelic.

One of his attempts to repossess the past, to substitute the White Goddess for Apollo and Zeus as the source of poetic magic far back in the dim beginning of all things, is “To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” surely one of the notable poems of the century. The poem contains an array of images and references which bring into relationship the mythology of the seasons, the ancient, doomed heroes of Aegean and Celtic legends, and the Goddess in her persons as mother, lover, and layer-out of the dead, all a part of old fertility myths of predestined death and miraculous rebirth. The same theme is presented in “The White Goddess.”

Graves has had a great deal to say—and most of that destructive—about the work of other poets but surprisingly little about his own, for he believes that the poem should be allowed to speak for itself. Also, he has stated that his writing belongs to the Anglo-Irish tradition into which he was born. This comment explains the mixture of irony and passion that we find in so much of his verse. He stands in the great tradition of Swift and Shaw, but with strange Celtic overtones of his own, and like them he shows the working of a mind that is partly imaginative, partly critical, and wholly committed to some individual concept of truth.

In “Rocky Acres” the images of some secret country of the heart and mind match perfectly the spirit of Robert Graves’s best poems. For the landscape of his imagination is no barren land; it shelters and nourishes the poet who shuns the crowd.

How he has made his solitary position a post of strategy and advantage is reflected in the various editions of his COLLECTED POEMS, especially in the consciousness of man’s burdens that we find in “Children of Darkness” and “Trudge, Body,” the acceptance of human mortality in “Surgical Ward: Men,” the reaching back into the dark corners of racial memory in “To Juan of the Winter Solstice,” the outrageous ribaldry of “Ogres and Pygmies” and “Down, Wanton, Down,” the droll foolery of “Mid-Winter Waking,” and “Traveller’s Curse After Misdirection,” the self-mockery of “A Pinch of Salt,” and the emotional depths of love revealed in “The Sharp Ridge” and “The Dangerous Gift.”

Poems such as these present Graves as a writer of considerable pith and variety, of occasional excellence so beautifully and precisely centered and controlled that his true quality deserves the recognition which criticism has so often withheld in the past. These poems, like all good poetry, offer first the shock of surprise and then take gradual possession of mind and mood. This is the true magic of poetry as Robert Graves conceives it.