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Graves And The Goddess: Essays on Robert Graves's the White Goddess
Presenting the personal mythology and poetic theories of Robert Graves, The White Goddess has intrigued and mystified readers since its publication in 1948. This volume contains 15 essays from scholars assessing the work from a variety of perspectives. Coverage includes the personal and historical tensions that shaped the book, the challenges of interpretation it poses for the reader, and its influence on other poets. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
- GenresPoetry
202 pages, Hardcover
First published August 31, 2003
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September 9, 2014
This is a fine selection of Essays. It is driven by a shared desire amongst the writers to generate interest in a book they find interesting. And what a book.
"The White Goddess" is unique: lunatic, provocative, and equal parts fascinating and frustrating. Perhaps the only thing that comes close is Yeats' "A Vision". Graves was burrowing down in an attempt to explain to himself where the poems came from and how the poet should live. He had discarded his work from the 1920s which had extended W.H.R.Rivers' work on Freud, and he had become obsessed with the figure of the White Goddess.
There may be people who take 'The White Goddess' at face value as a factual historical investigation, but that has always been a difficult position to hold and increasingly so given modern knowledge of the literature Graves was using. To write intelligently about it, to be enthusiastic without trying to hide the awkwardness, to be scholarly about a book that thumbs its nose at scholastic method, is a challenging task. The range of essays here do not shirk the critical problems: Graves' scholarship was dodgy, his "history" debatable, his method 'unique' and his sources unreliable but they each make a case for the book's value while admitting its flaws. For example, Celtic scholars have always been wary (for good reasons) and there's a good essay here by Mary-Ann Constantine called "The Battle for "The Battle of the Trees" which sums up the case against Graves and then suggests why his book might still be worthy of a celtic scholar's interest.
The one thing missing is probably an essay called "Was Laura Riding THE White Goddess?". It's taken for granted by some of the writers, but as Frank Kersnowski points out here, in an argument he later extended into a book length study, "The Early Poetry of Robert Graves", the idea of the Goddess was present from very early on. Riding claimed the ideas in the book were hers. Maybe it no longer matters. But I think assuming that Graves wrote the book to write Laura into a manageable figure in his private mythology is to reduce this remarkable book to something polite and easy to deal with: a mistake most of these essays don't make.
I think Paul O'Prey sums it up in more ways than one at the end of his essay "The White Goddess: A Proselytising Text": He wrote, Graves had a "quasi religious commitment to poetry" which was "without parallel amongst all his contemporaries".
That can make Graves a very uncomfortable writer to deal with. There was no pretence of scholarly objectivity, instead an intense personal commitment to what was essentially a private mythology, and it's the intensity and the subjectivity that can make readers uncomfortable if not dismissive.
O'Prey's last paragraph continues:
'Of all the twentieth century's strategies to regenerate English poetry...this was the most idiosyncratic and even the most radical as well as curiously the most convincing, because it addresses not stylistics or rhetoric (like most other such strategies) but the moral and cultural foundations on which poetry is built. Although the strategy is unworldly, it is not unpolitical. 'The White Goddess' was Grave's somewhat jaundiced view of what had gone wrong with western society, and was a stirring call for poets to lead the way in its reform. And for him the poet would not succeed in this by extra-literary interventions to heal the wounds in society, as he had somewhat grandiosely announced as his intention in "Poetic Unreason' twenty years earlier , but by rather more humbly and realistically trying to heal himself."
"The White Goddess" is unique: lunatic, provocative, and equal parts fascinating and frustrating. Perhaps the only thing that comes close is Yeats' "A Vision". Graves was burrowing down in an attempt to explain to himself where the poems came from and how the poet should live. He had discarded his work from the 1920s which had extended W.H.R.Rivers' work on Freud, and he had become obsessed with the figure of the White Goddess.
There may be people who take 'The White Goddess' at face value as a factual historical investigation, but that has always been a difficult position to hold and increasingly so given modern knowledge of the literature Graves was using. To write intelligently about it, to be enthusiastic without trying to hide the awkwardness, to be scholarly about a book that thumbs its nose at scholastic method, is a challenging task. The range of essays here do not shirk the critical problems: Graves' scholarship was dodgy, his "history" debatable, his method 'unique' and his sources unreliable but they each make a case for the book's value while admitting its flaws. For example, Celtic scholars have always been wary (for good reasons) and there's a good essay here by Mary-Ann Constantine called "The Battle for "The Battle of the Trees" which sums up the case against Graves and then suggests why his book might still be worthy of a celtic scholar's interest.
The one thing missing is probably an essay called "Was Laura Riding THE White Goddess?". It's taken for granted by some of the writers, but as Frank Kersnowski points out here, in an argument he later extended into a book length study, "The Early Poetry of Robert Graves", the idea of the Goddess was present from very early on. Riding claimed the ideas in the book were hers. Maybe it no longer matters. But I think assuming that Graves wrote the book to write Laura into a manageable figure in his private mythology is to reduce this remarkable book to something polite and easy to deal with: a mistake most of these essays don't make.
I think Paul O'Prey sums it up in more ways than one at the end of his essay "The White Goddess: A Proselytising Text": He wrote, Graves had a "quasi religious commitment to poetry" which was "without parallel amongst all his contemporaries".
That can make Graves a very uncomfortable writer to deal with. There was no pretence of scholarly objectivity, instead an intense personal commitment to what was essentially a private mythology, and it's the intensity and the subjectivity that can make readers uncomfortable if not dismissive.
O'Prey's last paragraph continues:
'Of all the twentieth century's strategies to regenerate English poetry...this was the most idiosyncratic and even the most radical as well as curiously the most convincing, because it addresses not stylistics or rhetoric (like most other such strategies) but the moral and cultural foundations on which poetry is built. Although the strategy is unworldly, it is not unpolitical. 'The White Goddess' was Grave's somewhat jaundiced view of what had gone wrong with western society, and was a stirring call for poets to lead the way in its reform. And for him the poet would not succeed in this by extra-literary interventions to heal the wounds in society, as he had somewhat grandiosely announced as his intention in "Poetic Unreason' twenty years earlier , but by rather more humbly and realistically trying to heal himself."
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