Robert Graves

Author profile

born

July 24, 1895 in Wimbledon, The United Kingdom

died

December 07, 1985

gender

male

genre

Literature & Fiction, Poetry, Biographies & Memoirs

About this author

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Robert Ranke Graves, born in Wimbledon, 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 h...more Robert Ranke Graves, born in Wimbledon, 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 failure.(less)

combine editions
Books by Robert Graves

Average rating: 4.08 · 33,896 ratings · 1,770 reviews · 131 distinct works

	I, Claudius 4.24 avg rating — 12,469 ratings — published 1934 — 69 editions	My rating:
	Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina 4.15 avg rating — 2,807 ratings — published 1934 — 39 editions	My rating:
	Goodbye to All That 4.01 avg rating — 1,858 ratings — published 1929 — 28 editions	My rating:
	The Greek Myths: Combined Edition 4.15 avg rating — 1,339 ratings — published 1945 — 37 editions	My rating:
	The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth 3.99 avg rating — 949 ratings — published 1948 — 18 editions	My rating:
	I, Claudius/Claudius the God 4.38 avg rating — 769 ratings — published 1934 — 7 editions	My rating:
	Count Belisarius 4.07 avg rating — 307 ratings — published 1938 — 16 editions	My rating:
	King Jesus: A Novel 3.88 avg rating — 287 ratings — published 1946 — 16 editions	My rating:
	The Greek Myths 1 4.11 avg rating — 248 ratings — published 1955 — 19 editions	My rating:
	Greek Gods and Heroes 3.67 avg rating — 212 ratings — published 1960 — 10 editions	My rating:

More books by Robert Graves…

Series by Robert Graves

Claudius (2 books)
by Robert Graves

4.23 avg rating — 16,045 ratings

Quotes by Robert Graves

“When the immense drugged universe explodes
In a cascade of unendurable colour
And leaves us gasping naked,
This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:
Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
Which alone, as we know certainly, restores
Fragmentation into true being.

Ecstasy of Chaos”
― Robert Graves, Poems 1965-1968

tags: poetry

56 people liked it

“There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.”
― Robert Graves

tags: robert-graves

47 people liked it

“She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.”
― Robert Graves

31 people liked it

See all Robert Graves's quotes »

Polls

What non-fiction book would you like to read for our April group read?

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell

17 votes, 40.5%

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

10 votes, 23.8%

The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 by Robert Graves

8 votes, 19.0%

From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1910-1928 by Christine A. Lunardini

7 votes, 16.7%

42 total votes

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