PAUL O’PREY

 

 

Placing Robert Graves in the history of twentieth century English Literature was identified as problematic as early as 1960, by Donald Davie. Graves’s prodigious and extended output - more than twelve hundred poems written over a period of sixty years from 1914 to 1974 – makes it difficult to fit him into a coherent, critical narrative constructed on period, movement or school.  For example, when we talk of his reputation as a poet, are we referring to Graves the Georgian, Graves the war poet, Graves the Modernist, or Graves the new age Goddess-worshipper, or a fusion of these many and varied Graves’s? Or, perhaps rather more accurately, none of them? And who, precisely, are Graves’s contemporaries? In the course of a long life he was a personal and a poetic role model for both Wilfred Owen, who died in 1918, and for Ted Hughes, whose first poems were published forty years later.

 

It was Hughes who presided over the ceremony in Westminster Abbey in 1985, when Robert Graves became the first poet to be commemorated in stone in Poets’ Corner while he was still alive. When you consider that both Shakespeare and Byron had to wait for over a hundred years after their deaths before being granted this ceremonial, state recognition, this event shows what an impatient – or perhaps a confident - society we have become in conferring cultural authority. Graves is in Poets Corner as one of the poets of the Great War, along with, among others, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Nichols, on all of whose poetry he had exercised a defining influence. The nature of this honour is of course an indication of how the poetry of the First World War has become part of the nation’s consciousness and its conscience, rather than a direct comment on the literary value of Graves’s own work. But it is ironic that he is remembered in such a way, given that he himself had since the 1930s systematically excluded his war poems from collections of his poetry, on the grounds that they were immature and ‘too obviously written in the war poetry boom’.[1]

 

In 1960 Donald Davie warned, with some foresight, that historians ‘will try to forget Graves’,[2] because, he claimed, Graves was a special case, the exception that always seemed to prove the rule. Today Graves is little studied in British and American universities and has become a somewhat marginal figure in turn of the century histories of twentieth century literature. Graves is not on the teaching syllabus in schools, which has a powerful influence on the creation of contemporary reputation. On the other hand, many of the modern poets who feature most strongly in the classrooms of British schools - Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Roger McGough and Simon Armitage – have all expressed personal admiration for Graves and he is acknowledged as an influence on their work.

 

Graves’s poetry is never out of print, which means, presumably, that people continue to read his work. His reputation, therefore, could be said to be high among poets, publishers, the poetry buying public, and the Dean  and Chapter of Westminster Abbey. His standing, however, is not currently high among British curriculum designers or academics.

 

The predominant subject of Graves’s poetry is the poet’s self, and the role of that poet in society. One reading of the body of his poetry is as the emotional and spiritual autobiography of a poet consciously writing himself into the margins of society, given that in a gradual process of regeneration and refashioning after the First World War, he came to believe that the margin was the right place to be for an English poet whose overriding moral duty was to tell the truth. I would suggest that the political and cultural agenda he pursued in his poetry, together with his own actions in life of self-marginalisation, have contributed since his death both to his critical marginalisation, and to an unhelpful focus on the subject matter of the autobiographical poems, rather than the poems themselves.

 

Graves was one of the most single-mindedly ambitious poets of the century. Few of his contemporaries gave so much thought as to what it means to be a poet, and perhaps none took the title of poet so seriously. He claimed that he wrote ‘poetry for poets’ and was unconcerned with what anyone else thought about his work. He  expressed a low regard for evaluative literary histories, which he believed were dictated by non-literary prejudice and ideology. However, there can be no doubt that he consciously aimed to create a body of work that would achieve a form of permanence, by focussing on craftsmanship, the exact use of language and personal integrity - a paradigm of ‘great poetry’ that looks increasingly historical. In prose works such as The White Goddess, and in his numerous critical essays and lectures on poetry, he simultaneously tried to establish the terms on which he himself wanted to be judged, as the terms on which all poetry should be judged. In this he was only partially successful.

 

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in her book Contingencies of Value, argues that since evaluative criticism has lost its pre-eminence, re-valuations of the canon can be driven by politics as much as taste. It is important, if that is true, to point out that no critic has attacked Graves as a bad poet. He has not been dismissed from the canon, but he is perhaps an example of what Herrnstein Smith calls the ‘noteworthy correlation of validity with silence’.[3]

 

Graves’s first book of poems was published while he was in France, in 1916. This was mainly a collection of poems about the war, and was received with some surprise by readers and fellow poets. The anonymous reviewer in the TLS noted their ‘compelling rawness and … blunt familiarity’, and admired the ‘arresting sense of the realities of trench life’[4]. The poems were tame compared to what Graves, Owen, Sassoon and others of their circle went on to write, but the review shows Graves was one of the first to attempt to write in a way about the war which tried to capture the extremeness of the experience. Indeed, Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer in Graves’s regiment and one of his closest friends during the war, thought Graves’s early poems about the war ‘violent and repulsive’.[5]

 

As the war progressed, poets such as Sassoon and Owen developed a more overtly political aesthetic, and saw poetry as a weapon to be deployed against the civilian and military attitudes which endorsed the continuation of hostilities against Germany. Somewhat typically, Graves was by this time doing something different, using his poetry in a more personal quest for survival. The majority of the poems he wrote in 1917 while sitting in trenches and dugouts along the Somme, were not about the horrors of trench life, but about childhood innocence and the English and Welsh countryside. He appeared to use his poetry to protect himself from being overwhelmed by the war by writing about situations and images that were emblematic of peace. To Sassoon, this now looked like escapism and the dereliction of his duty as a war poet.

 

Graves’s feelings about the war were more complex and ambiguous than Sassoon’s, and his writings reflect this. For modern readers in particular, he can be unfashionably positive about soldiering and enthusiastic about bravery. His best war poems are celebratory of the bond of friendship and solidarity that grew to exist between those caught in the fighting, and which sustained him emotionally during his time at the front and after.

 

The reception of Graves as a war poet changed radically from 1918, when he was read and regarded as one of the most significant young voices, to 1979, when he was the last of the major war poets still surviving. He appeared in the earliest popular anthologies of war poetry, including Marsh’s Georgian Poetry III and E. B. Osborn's The Muse in Arms, both published during the war. Osborn included three of Graves's poems, compared to Sassoon's two, Brooke's two, Gurney's four, and Robert Nichols's eleven.  The anthology now reads oddly because it omits entirely the two writers generally considered today to be the major voices among active combatants, Owen and Rosenberg. 

 

This had changed by 1943. Graves, Blunden and Sassoon are the major voices in Robert Nichols’s own Anthology of War Poetry, published in  that year, but the highest praise in the introduction is for Owen, whose poems are 'by far the most beautiful written during the war'.[6]

 

The continued rise of Owen's reputation is marked by his domination of Jon Silkin's 1979 Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Silkin acknowledges a correlation between the number of poems by which individual poets are represented in his anthology and his evaluation of that poet's 'excellence':

 

...the reader will be correct in thinking that the more poems there are by a poet the more highly I think of him.[7]

 

Silkin also admits that his selection is directed by his anti-war politics, and he arranges the poems into four 'stages of consciousness'.[8]  The first, of which Brooke is most representative, is 'the passive reflection of … the prevailing patriot ideas’.  The second, 'properly represented by Sassoon', is protest.  The third 'stage of consciousness' is compassion, typified by Owen, while the final stage - and one is led to infer the most 'excellent', at least politically - is one in which 'anger and compassion are merged, with extreme intelligence’  by Rosenberg.  Graves's own rather confused course through the war does not fit neatly into any of these 'stages of consciousness'; his better poems are too ambiguous or enthusiastic to appeal to an overtly anti-war editor and not surprisingly, perhaps, he is represented in the anthology by only two poems, both of which present a negative image of his war experience. 

 

There can be few clearer examples of editorial power effecting a revision of what Hans Jauss called the ‘horizon of expectations’ that the reader brings to bear in evaluating a literary event.[9] Silkin’s conflation of ‘literary excellence’ and a sympathy for a political viewpoint produced a narrative of First World War poetry that was persuasive to a Cold War audience disillusioned in its leaders and increasingly suspicious of the legitimacy of nation state conflict.

 

Silkin’s narrative of anti-progress from idealism to bitterness was challenged in 1983 by the publication of Poetry of the Great War, edited by Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, who allowed a less selective reading to show that Graves’s erratic and complex response to the war was not so atypical.

 

Graves held strong views about anthologies and in 1928 wrote with Laura Riding a polemical Pamphlet Against Anthologies. In this they criticised what they called the popular or general anthology as detrimental to poetry because it yoked together disparate poetic voices, exaggerated the reputations of poets who had written poems which particularly suited the anthology medium, and because it established a distinct canon which was dictated not by excellence but by commercial opportunism. 

 

As a consequence of adopting this stance, Graves refused numerous invitations to appear in anthologies, most notably Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, with its potential to establish the reputation of a contemporary poet.  In his Introduction Yeats expressed his ‘distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the Great War’, adding: ‘They were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity…but felt bound to plead the suffering of their men …Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.’[10]

 

The price of writing war poetry, and of becoming a Great War poet, was, for most of them, violent death. Foucault’s observation that writing ‘possesses the right to kill, to be its author’s murderer’, here has a rather literal meaning.[11] Such a death can create its own narrative of the poet as hero. If Owen, Rosenberg and all the other poets had survived, like Graves, into their nineties, would we still read their poems as the tragic voice of youth and innocence mangled in the machinery of mindless war, if that is how we do read them, or, like Yeats, would we be rather more cold hearted, seeing them as passive, pity-full observations of the suffering of others, which are not actually very well written? Would Owen’s plea to be judged on the pity rather than the poetry have secured him critical immunity?

After the war Graves suffered a long period of restless uncertainty, at times hopelessly trying to recapture the pre-war easiness of Thomas Hardy and Walter de la Mare, at others exploring the more dangerous country of psychological disorder and insanity, haunted by memories of the war. He suffered from prolonged and crippling neurasthenia, and put up with acute financial difficulties in raising four children while  attempting to build a career out of poetry. His frustration was noted by Samuel Hynes, in A War Imagined:

A man like Graves, who was only nineteen when the war began, must have felt himself outrageously overtaken by time, deprived of his literary youth before he'd had it, and supplanted before he had begun to make a literary name - a poet who was too Georgian to make common cause with the home-front Modernists, and too experienced and war-weary to join the post-war young... .  men [like Graves] were the real Lost Generation, not the men who died; they had fallen out of the literary world of their own time, into the gap of the war.  Or so, at least, it must have seemed to them.[12]

The new world belonged to writers like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot who were less encumbered with the baggage of war. Graves and Eliot liked and admired each other, and it was Eliot who took the brave decision to publish The White Goddess, because he believed it was such an important work. But Eliot’s poetry of fastidious despair exasperated Graves, who asked:  ‘why is he complaining?  Who forced him, during the Battle of the Somme, to attend London tea-parties presided over by boring hostesses?’[13]

In the early 1920s Graves wrote Poetic Unreason, a collection of essays proposing a new and more theoretical approach to criticism, and exploring the question of what the moral role of a poet should be in a post-war society whose characteristics are confusion and discord. It was the poet’s duty in such a world, he concluded, to try to be the ‘representative spokesman’ for all parts of society and to try to reconcile and heal it through art. It was not a vision he held for long.

In the same year the book was published, he met the American modernist, Laura Riding, who was to change fundamentally the way he wrote, as well as the way he viewed literature and society.  He was at the time co-writing a book on modern poetry with Eliot. He abandoned this to write, with Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, in which the poet is seen as having a very different role to play in society. In the Survey they drew a distinction between ‘modern-ness’, which they defined as a ‘keeping up in poetry with the pace of civilization and intellectual history’, and true ‘modernism’, which had nothing to do with the date or with responding to the needs of civilization’.[14]

Riding followed A Survey with the startling declaration that historic time had come to an end, which for her became the basic premiss on which modernism was to be founded. The direct effect of history coming to an end for Graves was his astonishing attempt to kill himself off in a Foucault-like death by writing, in Goodbye To All That, followed by a Nietzschean waking up in the arms of Laura’s ‘final reality’. In the penultimate paragraph of the 1929 edition, in the 'Dedicatory Epilogue to Laura Riding', he wrote: ‘I write these words on July 24th, my 34th birthday; another month of final review and I shall have parted with myself for good’.  Up until this point his story, he claimed, had been one of ‘gradual disintegration’, of ‘enduring blindly in time’, until he had been released from time by Riding who let him achieve his ‘true quality of one living invisibly, against kind, as dead, beyond event’.

 

This particular modernist attempt at re-fashioning marked not an experiment in style but an experiment in living. Graves would no longer seek to heal society or save civilization, it was to be every poet for himself. Shortly after writing Goodbye To All That Graves broke with most of his friends and family,  and ‘left England’ with Riding, resolving, he said, ‘never to make it my home again’.[15]

 

The history Graves was seeking to liberate himself from was very much a concept of English history, rather than the more Germanic philosophical abstraction inherent in Riding’s theory. History ended for Riding when she tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window in Hammersmith. For Graves and many of his contemporaries fighting in France, it was a national event that happened much earlier. For many of them the greatest casualty of the war was that potent construction of social, moral and spiritual values signified for them by the heady word 'England'. Owen, in his ironic poem ‘Smile Smile, Smile’, expressed a common feeling that by September 1918, when the poem was written, England had been destroyed by the English themselves, rather than by any foreign army. He attacked the Daily Mail's vision of a victorious nation and exposed the potential for bitterness towards society among those who would survive:           

 

Nation? - The half-limbed readers did not chafe

But smiled at one another curiously

Like secret men who know their secret safe.

(This is the thing they know and never speak,

That England one by one had fled to France,

Not many elsewhere now, save under France.)

Graves, who was half Irish, half German, spent his childhood holidays in Wales and lived most of his life in Spain, developed an even greater dissatisfaction with England during its post-war modernisation. The inexorable wave of urbanisation, industrialisation, mass production, roads, cars, housing estates, led him to develop a view of poetry as an anti-social activity in an anti-poetic world.  The challenge for a poet in such a world, he declared, was to avoid contact with ‘the walking dead’, by which he meant ‘all those geared to the industrial machine’, or in post-war Britain, more or less anyone with a proper job. He himself refused ‘to be anyone’s servant but my own’ on the grounds that employment compromised his poetic integrity.[16] In The White Goddess he made much of his retreat to the small mountain village of Deià, Mallorca, which was still ‘pre-industrial’, where ‘life is ruled by the old agricultural cycles’.[17] Here he made his home in the bucolic idyll he had dreamed of while hunched in a dug-out at the Somme, but which then was a wet Welsh hillside rather than a stony Spanish olive grove.

‘Cuirassiers of the Frontier’, his description of soldiers battling abroad for an empire that is crumbling and rotting at home, concludes with a bitter observation:

We, not the City, are the Empire’s soul.

A rotten tree lives only in its rind.

These lines not only describe the feelings of many of the soldiers who fought with him in France in the Great War, but also define his concept of the marginalisation of poets and poetry in modern industrial Britain. The poet’s response to this marginalisation is clear to Graves. The ‘true’ or ‘dedicated’ or ‘muse’ poet caught up in such a world must be content to be a voice in the wilderness. He must resist the temptation to get involved, or ‘become a do-gooder’.[18]

In The White Goddess Graves rallied poets to reject the erosion of value in a society driven by money, power and technology and to avoid contamination by refusing to engage with it on its own terms. He defined a disunion between what England had become, and what poetry should be, in a way that struck a chord with a number of younger poets such as Ted Hughes, Donald Davie and Phillip Larkin. In his essay, ‘Englands of the Mind’, Seamus Heaney analyses Hughes and Larkin’s nostalgia for the lost, ‘real England’. He does not mention Graves, but slyly points the finger at him by describing the prosaic reality of ‘Larkin’s England’ in language drawn directly, explicitly, from The White Goddess’:

The poet is no longer a bardic remnant nor an initiate in curious learning nor a jealous master of the secrets of a craft; he is a humane and civilized member of the customs service or the civil service or, indeed, the library service. The moon is no longer his white goddess but his poetic property, to be image rather than icon…[as] she watches over an England of department stores, canals and floatings of industrial froth…’[19]

It was Robert Graves, perhaps more than anyone, who turned the Movement’s attention from, as Heaney puts it,  ‘the matter of England,’ towards ‘what was the matter with England’, though his own form of nostalgia was radical and anarchic compared to the Movement’s more reasonable and hesitant grumblings.

Graves is an interesting case study of how reputations are made and lost. Despite the dislocations of war, modernism and postmodernism, Graves is an unbroken connection with the sprit of Hardy. Perhaps another way of saying this is that he was out of step with the spirit of the various literary movements he lived through. He is part of the Georgian, war poet and modernist narratives, but always at the edge, or at a tangent. He left Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War, just as other writers were anxious to go there. He influenced the Movement and the Beats, but was never part of them.

Graves is not a great Great War poet in the same vein as Owen or Rosenberg. He is, however, a more accomplished poet than either of them. He created a large body of lyric poetry that will endure because of its craftsmanship, its control of language and form, its balance of emotional complexity and intellectual clarity, and of romantic passions and classical poise. His remarkably intimate account of personal discovery and survival, and of a search for integrity and coherence in a century which, in retrospect, is most remarkable for its instability and confusion, is emblematic of its time. His poetry is a spirited defence of individualism in an epoch defined by the rise of mass society, and of the same values of ‘civilisation’ he had fought for in France.

 

Paul O’Prey

 

This article was first published in the WPA’s journal War Poetry Review 2007.