Robert Graves

For other people named Robert Graves, see Robert Graves (disambiguation).

Robert Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist and critic. His second name is sometimes written as von Ranke. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves, was a well-known Irish poet who was part of the Gaelic revival. Both father and son were Celticists and studied Irish mythology.

Robert Graves wrote more than 140 works during his life. His poems, his translations, and his fresh way of studying the Greek myths have never stopped being printed. The same is true of his memoir about his early life, which includes his time in the First World War. That book is called Good-Bye to All That (1929). Another well-known book is The White Goddess (1948), in which he explores where poetic inspiration might come from. He was also a famous short story writer, and a story called "The Tenement" is still read today.

Graves earned his living by writing. He is best known for popular historical novels such as I, Claudius (1934), Count Belisarius (1938), and King Jesus (1946). He was also an important translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts. His versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass are still popular because they are clear and fun to read. In 1934, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

Graves's oldest half-brother, Philip, became a successful journalist. His younger brother, Charles, was also a writer and journalist.

Early life

Robert Graves was born into a comfortable middle-class family in Wimbledon, which was then part of Surrey and is now part of south London. He was the eighth of ten children. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931), was the sixth child and second son of Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. His father worked as an Irish schools inspector and was a Gaelic scholar. He also wrote the popular song "Father O'Flynn." His mother, Amalie Elisabeth Sophie von Ranke (1857–1951), was a grandniece of the historian Leopold von Ranke. One of his uncles, Admiral Sir Richard Poore, commanded the Nore during the First World War. In 1895 he was baptised as "Robert Ranke" at Wimbledon, into the Church of England.

When he was seven, he became very ill with double pneumonia after having measles. It was nearly fatal. This was the first of three times his doctors worried about his lungs. The second time came after a war wound. The third time, he caught Spanish influenza in late 1918, just before demobilisation.

Graves attended six preparatory schools. These included King's College School in Wimbledon, Penrallt in Wales, Hillbrow School in Rugby, Rokeby School in Wimbledon, and Copthorne in Sussex. In 1909 he won a scholarship to Charterhouse School. There he began writing poetry and boxing, and he became school champion at welter- and middleweight. He sang in the choir and made a friend named G. H. "Peter" Johnstone, who appears in Good-Bye to All That. His most important teacher there was George Mallory, who later died while trying to climb Mount Everest. Mallory introduced him to modern literature and took him mountaineering. In his final year, Graves won a classical exhibition to St John's College, Oxford, but he did not start there until after the war. In 1914 he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers. On 23 January 1918, he married Nancy Nicholson at St James's Church, Piccadilly.

First World War

When the First World War began in August 1914, Graves joined the army almost at once. On 12 August he became a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was quickly promoted. In August 1916, an officer who did not like him spread a rumour that he was the brother of a captured German spy who called himself "Karl Graves". The problem came back in a small way during the Second World War, when a suspicious policeman blocked his appointment to the Special Constabulary. In 1916 Graves published his first poems, Over the Brazier, and became known as an early war poet. Later he left most of his war poems out of his collections, though the early "In the Wilderness" was kept. On 20 July 1916, at High Wood during the Battle of the Somme, he was badly wounded. Wrongly, it was officially reported that he had died. He slowly recovered and spent the rest of the war in England, apart from a short return to France.

Graves's friend Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer, was also recovering at Somerville College, Oxford, which was being used as a hospital for officers. In 1917 Sassoon made a public statement against the war. Graves worried that Sassoon could face a court martial, so he persuaded the military authorities that Sassoon had shell shock and needed treatment for it. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Edinburgh. There he was treated by W. H. R. Rivers and met the patient Wilfred Owen. Graves was treated there too, for shell shock, or neurasthenia, though he was never sent to hospital for it. In September 1917 he was sent to a garrison battalion. His army career ended after an incident that could have led to a charge of desertion. In late 1918 he was posted to Limerick, where he became ill with Spanish influenza. He decided to travel to England for treatment. He arrived at London Waterloo Station with a high fever, but without the papers that would release him from the army. By chance, he shared a taxi with an officer who completed the papers for him.

Post-war life

After the war, Graves and his wife, Nancy Nicholson, had a growing family. He had little money and was not well in body or mind. In October 1919, he began studying at the University of Oxford. He soon switched to English Language and Literature, though he kept his Classics exhibition. Because of his health, he lived a little way outside Oxford, on Boars Hill. His neighbours there included Robert Bridges, John Masefield, who was also his landlord, Edmund Blunden, Gilbert Murray and Robert Nichols. Later, the family moved to Worlds End Cottage on Collice Street, in Islip, Oxfordshire.

His closest friend at Oxford was T. E. Lawrence, who was then a Fellow of All Souls. The two talked about modern poetry and played elaborate pranks together. By this time, Graves had become an atheist. His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics. While still a student, he opened a grocery shop near Oxford, but it soon failed. He also failed his BA degree. In 1925, he was allowed to earn a Bachelor of Letters through a dissertation instead. This let him pursue a teaching career. In 1926, he became a professor of English Literature at Cairo University. He took his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding, with whom he was in a close relationship. Graves was later told that one of his students there had been a young Gamal Abdel Nasser, but this is clearly untrue, since Nasser was only eight years old at the time. After a difficult separation from his wife, Graves left to live with Riding in Deià, on Mallorca. There they published books on letterpress under the Seizin Press. They also started the literary journal Epilogue and wrote two successful books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928). Both had a great influence on modern literary criticism, especially New Criticism.

Literary career

In 1927, Graves published a biography of T. E. Lawrence called Lawrence and the Arabs, which sold well. His memoir Good-Bye to All That (1929) was also a success, but it cost him some friends, including Siegfried Sassoon. In 1934, he published I, Claudius, his most popular book, about the Roman emperor Claudius. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Later, the books became the popular television series I, Claudius, with Sir Derek Jacobi in the lead role. In 1938, he wrote Count Belisarius, about the Byzantine general Belisarius.

In 1948, he published The White Goddess, a study of poetic inspiration. In 1955, he published The Greek Myths, which retells many Greek myths. In 1961, he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a job he held until 1966. In 1968, he was given the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry by Queen Elizabeth II. From the 1960s until his death, he often wrote letters to Spike Milligan.

Sexuality

Robert Graves's marriage to Nancy Nicholson was difficult. Part of the reason was that he was living with shell shock from the war. In 1926 he met Laura Riding. In 1929 he went away with her while he was still married to Nicholson. Later, after a long dispute with Nicholson, whom he had not yet divorced, Graves married Beryl Hodge in 1950.

Death and legacy

Graves began to have serious trouble with memory loss in the early 1970s. By his 80th birthday in 1975, he had stopped working. He died of heart failure on 7 December 1985, at the age of 90. He was buried the next morning in the small churchyard on a hill at Deià. The spot was once a shrine sacred to the White Goddess of Pelion. His second wife, Beryl, died in 2003 at the age of 88. Graves had eight children, including Lucia, who became a translator and author.

Three of his former houses have a blue plaque in Wimbledon, Brixham, and Islip. On 11 November 1985, Graves was one of sixteen poets from the First World War honoured with a slate stone in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. The stone has words from Wilfred Owen: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." Graves was the only one of the sixteen still alive at the ceremony. He died less than a month later. He turned down a CBE in 1957. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, but he was not chosen. In 1967 he was considered for the post of Poet Laureate, but he was not picked.