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Love Respelt
Collection of forty poems by Robert Graves.
- GenresPoetry
44 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1966
22 people want to read
About the author
Robert Graves
639 books2,062 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 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 3, 2020
I feel unequipped to read much less review poetry. But why should that stop me? My take is poets are a fearless lot: fully expecting a life of being misunderstood, shunning by family and 'why don't you get a real job?' types, and redundantly being broke. For what? For the joy of finding the right word? These poems do what poems at their best do for me: put words together that I've never heard together before, yet not randomly as a million monkeys with typewriters might do, other poets might do that (see: John Ashberry in Wakefulness) but phrases, metaphors that come from sleepless weekends at the point of insanity, hungry, cold, drunk? Graves was successful here. He came up with the goods. I have faith in him enough to read more of his stuff. I think one key to this volume was I always knew all the poems were on the same subject. He delved deeply on the love of his life (in my opinion) a woman he was crazy about and their mutual, e-freaking-ternal love the world is eating its heart out about. Some of the poems were basically: 'God, how they envy our thing'. I imagined I was on a Mediterranean island living in the same artist colony with them watching him live and describe that love affair. While maybe I couldn't see myself making the same pick I repected his choice. Monkey update: while I've enjoyed the image of a million monkeys in a room with type writers given an unlimited amount of time coming out with Shakespeare's oeuvre, I heard recently a college in England actually tried this and they had to cancel the experiment because the monkeys ended up befouling the typewriters with poop to where the keys wouldn't move. Sorry, Robert, but I'll be reading more of your stuff.
November 30, 2019
As Robert Graves wrote one of my favorite books of all time, "I, Claudius," I began reading this slim little poetry volume of his as soon as I discovered it at a library sale.
Most of the pieces are concise, yet beautiful. No poem took up more than a single page, and a few particularly sparse entries were only four or five lines. As the title suggests, all of them focus, either obviously or in veiled allegorical prose, on the theme of love.
My favorite poems were "The Snap-Comb Wilderness," which delicately describes the beauty of a woman's hair; "Black," a very short but eloquent poem with a dark undertone, and "Nothing Now Astonishes," which read so lyrically, I just had to read it aloud a couple of times.
An unexpected gem of a find.
Most of the pieces are concise, yet beautiful. No poem took up more than a single page, and a few particularly sparse entries were only four or five lines. As the title suggests, all of them focus, either obviously or in veiled allegorical prose, on the theme of love.
My favorite poems were "The Snap-Comb Wilderness," which delicately describes the beauty of a woman's hair; "Black," a very short but eloquent poem with a dark undertone, and "Nothing Now Astonishes," which read so lyrically, I just had to read it aloud a couple of times.
An unexpected gem of a find.
July 30, 2016
There were some beautiful metaphors throughout this work. However, I had a really difficult time connecting with it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews