Robert Graves

Robert Graves (1895-1985), English poet, novelist, and classical scholar. Robert von Ranke Graves was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford. Graves, who preferred to be known as a poet, wrote vigorous, witty, and, at times, intellectual verse. His first volume of poetry, Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), recounts his World War I experiences. Early in his career, Graves was considered a Georgian poet (one of a group of early 20th-century poets who wrote conventional lyric poetry and maintained a late-romantic style). As his career developed, he avoided identification with any school or poet and wrote with an intense, clear, and ordered voice. Several collected editions of his poems have appeared including Collected Poems (1959, 1975). In 1968, in collaboration with the Sufi (see Sufism) poet Omar Ali-Shah, Graves produced The Original Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, claiming that the 19th-century translation by the English poet Edward FitzGerald was inadequate. Graves's version is unrhymed and uses contemporary diction. As a prose writer Graves produced a wide selection of books, ranging from Good-Bye to All That (1929; revised 1957), a satiric military memoir, to imaginative and historical fiction such as I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934), King Jesus (1946), and Homer's Daughter (1955). His research for The Golden Fleece (1944; United States title, Hercules, My Shipmate) led him to in-depth studies of myths and history on which he elaborated in scholarly works such as The White Goddess (1947), and Greek Myths and Legends (1968). In The White Goddess, Graves traces, in his words, “the variously named Great Goddess” through Welsh poetry and tree symbolism, Greek myth and mystery cults, and the religions of ancient Egypt and Israel. Graves held several university professorships, and after 1929 he resided on the Spanish island of Mallorca.