Graves believed that one could be in the true presence of the White Goddess when reading a poem, but in his view, this could be achieved only by a true poet of the wild, and not a classical poet, or even a Romantic poet, of whom he spoke critically: "The typical poet of the 19th-century was physically degenerate, or ailing, addicted to drugs and melancholia, critically unbalanced and a true poet only in his fatalistic regard for the Goddess as the mistress who commanded his destiny". [3] Poetry and myth [ edit ] The Story of Marie Powell: Wife to Mr. Milton. London: Cassell, 1943; as Wife to Mr Milton: The Story of Marie Powell. New York: Creative Age Press, 1944.

Berg, Sanchia (19 July 2023). "No 10 turned down Larkin, Auden and other poets for laureate job". BBC News. Immediately after the war, Graves with his wife, Nancy Nicholson had a growing family, but he was financially insecure and weakened physically and mentally:The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Amended & enl. ed.[i.e. 4th ed.] (London: Faber & Faber) [US ed.= New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966] UK government documents released in 2023 reveal that in 1967 Graves was considered for, but then passed over for, the post of Poet Laureate. [52] With Alan Hodge) The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939, Faber, 1940, Macmillan, 1941. I first read The White Goddess during a road trip with my ex at the turn of the century. I can remember several days when we were staying at a bed-and-breakfast in pre-Katrina New Orleans. It was neither overly warm nor overly humid, and my erstwhile spouse was recovering from serving as a mosquito smorgasbord, so I had some down time to sit out on the patio and read. I have to say that the first time through this book left me confused and lost; the second time through I’m on firmer ground in understanding what Graves is trying to do with his “historical grammar of poetic myth” and I’m glad I have spent the last few months reading it again.

Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".Lawrence and the Arabs, J. Cape, 1927, published as Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure, Doubleday, Doran, 1928. At first glance, like so much of The White Goddess, this seems like a vaguely plausible statement. It has dates! It has reliable modern authorities! It has “as we have seen”! But my imagination is not nearly poetic enough—it is, perhaps, too “rigidly scientific”—to accept the nested sets of assumptions contained herein:

Greek Gods and Heroes. New York: Doubleday, 1960; as Myths of Ancient Greece. London: Cassell, 1961. The White Goddess is not scholarship, being unconcerned with the doubt that lies at the heart of every good scholar’s work, the may and might and if-then which bridges the gaps between probabilities and data. (It is also on many counts just plain wrong.) It is, however, the very expression of the central thesis that lies at the heart of Graves’ poetry, his conviction of an enduring goddess, a Muse that speaks to him across history.

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Under the cool, assured tone of very many of his poems, there is a shiver of apprehension, of danger, of being on the edge of madness. From the late 20s, still involved with Riding, there is his much-anthologised "The Cool Web": The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber) [Corr. 2nd ed. also issued by Faber in 1948] [US ed.= New York, Creative Age Press, 1948] Graves was altogether a singular person. Born in 1895, he emerged early as a poet: when he was reported "dead of wounds" just before his 21st birthday, it was as a poet as well as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers that he was described in the Times obituary. But he didn't fit into any category. Edward Marsh put him in the anthologies of Georgian poetry, but he wasn't a tweedy Georgian. He had nothing to do with the Modernist pioneers, TS Eliot or Ezra Pound, or later with the Pylon poets, Auden and Co. He earned his living writing fiction - most famously the Claudius books - which he described (with uncharacteristic humility) as pot-boilers.