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The Complete Poems
Graves described poetry as his ruling passion, and for him love was 'the main theme and origin of true poems'. He created a rich mythology where love, fear, fantasy and the supernatural play an essential role. Intimate yet universal, passionate yet precise, their brilliant alchemy of realism and magic made Graves' poems some of the finest of the last century. In this edition the poems appear without critical apparatus or commentary. The volume represents in its purest form the achievement of Graves' seventy productive years.
- GenresPoetryBritish Literature
883 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1995
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About the author
Robert Graves
634 books2,053 followersRobert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, soldier, historical novelist and critic. Born in Wimbledon, he received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G.H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo & Shakespeare, "who had felt as I did".
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
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".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
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".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 26, 2020
Um poeta grandioso. Os versos de Graves vivem perto do sagrado coração das coisas belas. Um livro a reler nos sucessivos invernos do tempo e da vida.
Mágico.
«... My verses, children – keep them poles apart –
And call the man a liar who says I wrote
All that I wrote in love, for love of art.»
Mágico.
«... My verses, children – keep them poles apart –
And call the man a liar who says I wrote
All that I wrote in love, for love of art.»
May 19, 2020
While I thoroughly enjoy Graves's poetry, none of it (or very little of it, more precisely) really shook the heart-strings or threw ice-water on the mind. There was never that setting-the-book-down-on-one's-lap-in-awe reaction to a poem as I sometimes get with Sexton or Liu Zongyuan or Snyder or Li Qingzhao (have you read her Southern Song?). Yet Graves clearly, oh-so clearly, had the poetic impulse, the metric fire, running in his veins:
“Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.” (From The White Goddess)
It is rare that a person live a life so governed by aesthetics, or dedicate oneself so fully to one's Muse. This Muse for Graves was his White Goddess, who inspired poetry "composed at the back of the mind; an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time powerfully disciplined.” This is not the reasonable verse of Pope, but something more, if not divine, then activated or roused within (from without). Asked what the Muse gives to the poet in an interview with The Paris Review, Graves had this to say:
". . . She serves as a focus and challenge. She gives happiness. Here I use the English language precisely -- hap: happening. She gives hap; provides happening. Tranquility is of no poetic use."
Suffice it to say that the Muse is afoot in many of Graves's poems, especially in his keen eye for imagery and depth of thought concerning many matters, though specifically love and myth; the man obviously had a considerably base of knowledge from which to draw at will, and his layered and ancient-seeming visions are expressed poignantly and memorably. I quibble with a few things, however (and this is likely me being a complete philistine), from his use of sight rhymes to his occasional wrenched meter. There were several poems whose topics I loved utterly, but couldn't ultimately give myself to, as reading bits here and there was so unnatural. Again, one can twist the accented blade a bit to make the verse more willing on the tongue, but for me that's an unequivocal no-no. I felt a distinct and peculiar sense of shame whenever this occurred. (Though, again, I am vastly uncultured compared to Graves, so I could well be in the wrong here.)
I also have to admit of some envy, not for his verse, necessarily, but for the life he created for himself, whisking himself away to the Western Mediterranean, living on an island with his quite singular family. The Paris Review quotes him also as saying: "One secret of being able to think is to have as little as possible around you that is not made by hand." And this credo was reified in the house he and his wife built in Mallorca (which you should gaze upon at some point). I'll admit that this speaks to the Luddite in me, and this amount of voluntary hermeticism is an ideal of mine, as well. He made it happen: the life, the writing, the Muse.
So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,
Rising in air as on a gander’s wing
At a careless comma,
“Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.” (From The White Goddess)
It is rare that a person live a life so governed by aesthetics, or dedicate oneself so fully to one's Muse. This Muse for Graves was his White Goddess, who inspired poetry "composed at the back of the mind; an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time powerfully disciplined.” This is not the reasonable verse of Pope, but something more, if not divine, then activated or roused within (from without). Asked what the Muse gives to the poet in an interview with The Paris Review, Graves had this to say:
". . . She serves as a focus and challenge. She gives happiness. Here I use the English language precisely -- hap: happening. She gives hap; provides happening. Tranquility is of no poetic use."
Suffice it to say that the Muse is afoot in many of Graves's poems, especially in his keen eye for imagery and depth of thought concerning many matters, though specifically love and myth; the man obviously had a considerably base of knowledge from which to draw at will, and his layered and ancient-seeming visions are expressed poignantly and memorably. I quibble with a few things, however (and this is likely me being a complete philistine), from his use of sight rhymes to his occasional wrenched meter. There were several poems whose topics I loved utterly, but couldn't ultimately give myself to, as reading bits here and there was so unnatural. Again, one can twist the accented blade a bit to make the verse more willing on the tongue, but for me that's an unequivocal no-no. I felt a distinct and peculiar sense of shame whenever this occurred. (Though, again, I am vastly uncultured compared to Graves, so I could well be in the wrong here.)
I also have to admit of some envy, not for his verse, necessarily, but for the life he created for himself, whisking himself away to the Western Mediterranean, living on an island with his quite singular family. The Paris Review quotes him also as saying: "One secret of being able to think is to have as little as possible around you that is not made by hand." And this credo was reified in the house he and his wife built in Mallorca (which you should gaze upon at some point). I'll admit that this speaks to the Luddite in me, and this amount of voluntary hermeticism is an ideal of mine, as well. He made it happen: the life, the writing, the Muse.
So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,
Rising in air as on a gander’s wing
At a careless comma,
April 19, 2013
Bit of a marathon, but I don't read poetry quickly anyway. The WWI poems are my favourites here, but many of the others are worth reading too. I'm no poetry reviewer so I won't embarrass myself trying to analyse any of them. I just like his writing, whatever he is doing. And these editions are beautiful books to hold and read.
January 28, 2025
I didn’t understand Graves until watching a few of his interviews that appeared on BBC, you can find them now on YouTube; ever since then, ‘yes, I get it: peace, leavings, pain, magic.’ But it would’ve been best to say: ‘hmmm…. Nobody here, well off to where I was off to.’
April 30, 2010
Brilliant collection of Robert Graves poems. They are diverse, intelligent, thought provoking, clever and wonderfully put together - the best are great, and the not so great are good - wonderful collection that all poem lovers should own.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews