On English poetry, being an irregular approach to the psychology of this art, from evidence mainly subjective

by Robert Graves

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Poetry

149 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Robert 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

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"One may think of Poetry as being like Religion, a modified descendant of primitive Magic; it keeps the family characteristic of stirring wonder by creating from unpromising lifeless materials an illusion of unexpected passionate life."

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reproduction is a good reading copy. There are no bad pages and the scan is good enough to preserve someone's marginal comments..

In his biography of Graves, Martin Seymour Smith wrote

‘On English poetry, for all its immaturity is in many ways even now a salutary and lucid book….it contains Graves’ view of poetry in embryo and is invaluable as a young poet’s immediate record of his practice-and as a record of the principles which guided him. It is the first book of its time to take a truly psychological approach to poetry, and to make use of modern psychological method.’

It’s a book by a young man, except this young man had been declared dead and had fought through the first world war. Seymour-Smith thought Graves turned to theory to dig himself out of a hole. The subtitle is honest: you have been warned. Irregular and subjective, the book consists of numbered sections which don't link, and Graves' evidence is mostly his own practice.

For anyone interested in Graves as poet or in poetry criticism in general, it’s a worthwhile read. Graves on poetry is always productive, even when, as he often was later, he was stubbornly and gloriously wrong headed. Like everything else he wrote he grounded what he said on on what he did. And from the start he wrote it all down in a clear, precise prose that laid his cards on the table.

It’s a fascinating book to compare with Eliot’s ‘The Sacred Wood’ which is roughly contemporary. While Eliot was hiding himself in theories of impersonality and turning his subjective state into declarations of Law, often in prose that seemed to require professional training to 'understand', Graves was trying to ‘save’ himself by accepting the mess he was in and writing out of it or through it, in some very personal writing.

While Eliot was sprinkling his verse with fragments from other languages, Graves, who was possibly a much better classicist than either Pound or Eliot, and whose knowledge of poetry and depth of reading was as good as either of theirs, was resolutely sticking to poetry in English.

It feels odd now to read a book that refuses to play the familiar scholarly games. Graves proceeds in numbered fragments, allusions, guess work. It will not, did not, could not satisfy those who thought criticism should be scientific, or who can’t read someone they don’t agree with, but I think I’d rather read him on Englsih poetry than anyone else.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a surprisingly useful book on writing and appreciating poetry, as well as on the life and calling of a poet. I say surprising, because the table of contents seems off-putting, listing 61 chapters, plus introductory note and appendix. But it turns out that some of the chapters of this short book are extended aphorisms, and throughout, Graves maintains a balance between authority and chattiness. He is opinionated, but his pronouncements are grounded in an awareness of the difficulty of the poet’s task and his admiration for the best of their achievements.
Along the way, the reader also learns some of what Graves doesn’t like. He wants no history of poetry, since it would mean treating the less good as extensively as the great. By his standards, the less good would be most of the 17th century (except Milton), spilling over to Pope and the other didactic poets of the early 18th. Such a history would also overemphasize either form or ideas. Both play a role in a great poem, but they don’t make a poem great. He is suspicious of schools, although he does concede a back and forth between two tendencies that he, in common with many others, terms Classic and Romantic. Although his sympathies are more with the latter, he is exacting in matters of form and rhythm. His admiration of Blake doesn’t extend to the hermetic world of his prophetic books, and he feels Whitman would have been better if he had disciplined his writing more.
For Graves, a poem is the product of both magic and craftsmanship. The magic is the first moment of inspiration, and doesn’t occur to just anyone. A born poet incorporates conflicting personalities and loyalties within himself (I’ll leave aside attempts at gender-neutral language, Graves isn’t PC in his views on woman poets). To be great, a poem must bear in itself an emotional conflict. But it’s not a great poem until going through the craftsmanship phase, when the poet worries and fiddles with vowel sounds, assonance, rhythm, rhyme, and word choices.
Among the pearls is his sensible comment on diction: “Ideally speaking, there is no especially poetic range of subjects, and no especially poetic group of words with which to treat them. Indeed, the more traditionally poetical the subject and the words, the more difficult it is to do anything with them.” He’s also refreshingly honest on what he calls putty: the material to which even the greatest of poets resorts to fill in the cracks in his poem. He hopes no one else notices, but is himself mortifyingly aware that it’s there.
I enjoyed spending the day with Graves as he shared this with me; at times, I forgot that the day was spent in airplanes and airport lounges; it felt more like we were in a corner booth of his favorite pub with a pint of ale.

[Lawrence Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would surely give ON ENGLISH POETRY five stars if I could read all of it; my copy is on one of those electric-book thingies and the scanning is a mess. Beyond that, what I could read was both useful and entertaining.