Birthday: Robert Graves, the emperors' biographer

Robert von Ranke Graves (1895-1985)

Poet, novelist, critic, classicist

Recipient, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1934

Professor of Poetry, University of Oxford, 1961-66

At his posh English public schools, Graves got years of heavy weather for his middle name- a family nod to a kinsman, the German historian. He took up boxing, sometimes feigned insanity, and formed a friendship with a Charterhouse classmate so intense it led to an interview with the housemaster.

He enlisted at the outbreak of World War I, and was seriously wounded. He fell in with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and published his own, well-regarded,verse (in later years, he played down its significance, dismissing it as a product of the English “war poetry industry”).

Graves took up a prewar scholarship offering to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he excelled in his studies and plotted elaborate pranks with T. E. Lawrence. He married, took his degree, and tried shopkeeping. When that didn’t work out he wangled a job at Cairo University in 1926, a Graves family friend, the poet Laura Ridings, tagging along. In no time, Graves and his wife had split, and he moved to Majorca with Ridings. He lived there the rest of his life, though, in due course, Ridings was replaced.

Blessed by a vivid style and ease of composition, Graves found he could make a steady living writing; his output ran to some 140 works over five decades. His Roman novels- I, Claudius; Claudius the God;  

The Twelve Caesars- were popular and financial successes; his wartime memoir, Goodbye to All That, remains a classic despite his diffidence about the genre. Graves’ remarkable output ranged from poetry to history to science fiction to mythology to cultural commentary and biography.

He declined a CBE in 1957; in 1962 Graves was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize but was passed over because he was primarily viewed as a poet, and a powerful Swedish Academy member insisted no poet should wear the laurels before Ezra Pound. In his 70s, Graves suffered a serious professional embarrassment when he published a translation of The Rubaiyat based on what turned out to be an Arabic copy his co-translators forged. After 1975 he suffered, increasingly, from dementia. Shortly before he died he was the only survivor of a group of sixteen English poets of the Great War honored by a plaque in Westminster Abbey.

Related sites:

Robert Graves. org

The Robert Graves Museum

“The Art of Poetry, No. 11”, The Paris Review, Summer 1969

Henry Bemis’s Book of the Day is a first edition of Graves’ comic romp, The Antigua Stamp, published in America in 1937. Please see our “Book of the Day” listing on Facebook and at http://henrybemisbookseller.blogspot.com/2015/07/birthday-book-robert-gravess-antigua.html