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Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing & Improper Language
Equal parts history and absurdity, this tongue-in-cheek treatise laments the decline of swearing and foul language in England and looks back with nostalgia at the glory days of oaths and blasphemies. Written when censorship in England was still in full sway, this was an impassionate defense of the foul-mouthed in literature and a resounding attack of hypocrisy and Puritanism.
- GenresLanguageNonfictionHumor
68 pages, Hardcover
Published March 27, 1972
About the author
Robert Graves
657 books2,125 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 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 17, 2017
Well this is an oddly amusing little book. In it Graves laments the decline in the art of swearing and the censorship to which it is (was?) subject at the time of writing. It is written in the usual rambling manner you expect but then Graves couldn't be much more specific as it wouldn't have been published thanks to the very censorship which he is fighting against. This does date it in places and many of the words and phrases he aludes to are now more widespread and acceptable than they were at the time of writing (although this in itself is part of the decline in swearing, the more accepted it becomes the less impact it has) but his principles still apply to many others. While this does make it all sound very serious, it really isn't as Graves also presents a few what if scenarios that look to the future and show how ridiculous it could all become were things to go too far one way or another.
June 24, 2023
At a time when censorship took a stern view of books likely to corrupt the manly bosom, or create a flutter in the womanly heart, Robert Graves takes a delightful view of swearing, without actually doing so. Very tongue-in-cheek British humour, poking fun at everything under the Empire's sun.
May 1, 2025
The taboos that have eased and those that have sprung up in the intervening century since this publication tell a sad tale. True eroticism is impossible without powerful tension and social obstacle, no wonder so many are lonely and hesitant to pair.
August 27, 2017
Muddled, but amusing, some wonderful quotes. Perhaps we find polysyllabic periphrasis slightly less funny than people did then.
July 9, 2013
What an odd little book! In the preface, Graves claims that its composition was occasioned by a teaching sojourn in Egypt, where, due to oppressive heat, a student strike, professional squabbles and an insect infestation in his house, "[his] language soon recovered much of its wartime foulness." It was issued, though, as part of a series called Today, To-morrow, and After that comprises other The Future of ____ titles, and it has the disjointed, padded feel of the kind of written-for-money, gimmicky series I'm all too familiar with in today's publishing market.
The title Lars Porsena, which initially drew me to the book, refers to a legendary king of the Etruscan city of Clusium, whose invasion of early Republican Rome is the subject of the much-memorized-by-English-schoolboys "Horatius at the Bridge." "Lars Porsena of Clusium/," Macaulay's poem begins, "By the Nine Gods he swore/That the great house of Tarquin/ Should suffer wrong no more." Lars Porsena was luckier than we, Graves asserts, in having "no less than nine gods to swear by, and every one of them ...taken absolutely seriously."
The thesis here, if I understand Graves correctly, is that, with the loss of faith in political and Supernatural institutions and the relaxation of taboos about elimination and procreation, swearing has lost much of its punch. "Any swearing," he says, "that fails to wound the susceptibility of the person sworn at, or of the witness to the oath, is mere fiddle-faddle." This requisite capacity to offend is at the heart of one of my favorite segments of Graves' argument, where he discusses the effect of class (he is writing in 1926) on the choice of invective. Among the "governed classes," Graves says, bastardy is subject to grave social sanctions and the term "bastard" is considered a deadly insult. The "governing classes," by contrast, with a tradition of semi-legitimate illegitimacy (for example, the numerous titled Fitzroys in English history), barely register the affront. This social dynamic is reversed with respect to the term "bugger," which, Graves says, "Dr. Johnson rightly defined ...as 'a term of endearment among sailors,'" but which, in the ruling class, was an imputation sufficient to permanently ruin a reputation. "Had the accusation been 'Mr. Wilde is a bastard,' shoulders would merely have been shrugged at the noble lord's quixotic ill-temper."
The title Lars Porsena, which initially drew me to the book, refers to a legendary king of the Etruscan city of Clusium, whose invasion of early Republican Rome is the subject of the much-memorized-by-English-schoolboys "Horatius at the Bridge." "Lars Porsena of Clusium/," Macaulay's poem begins, "By the Nine Gods he swore/That the great house of Tarquin/ Should suffer wrong no more." Lars Porsena was luckier than we, Graves asserts, in having "no less than nine gods to swear by, and every one of them ...taken absolutely seriously."
The thesis here, if I understand Graves correctly, is that, with the loss of faith in political and Supernatural institutions and the relaxation of taboos about elimination and procreation, swearing has lost much of its punch. "Any swearing," he says, "that fails to wound the susceptibility of the person sworn at, or of the witness to the oath, is mere fiddle-faddle." This requisite capacity to offend is at the heart of one of my favorite segments of Graves' argument, where he discusses the effect of class (he is writing in 1926) on the choice of invective. Among the "governed classes," Graves says, bastardy is subject to grave social sanctions and the term "bastard" is considered a deadly insult. The "governing classes," by contrast, with a tradition of semi-legitimate illegitimacy (for example, the numerous titled Fitzroys in English history), barely register the affront. This social dynamic is reversed with respect to the term "bugger," which, Graves says, "Dr. Johnson rightly defined ...as 'a term of endearment among sailors,'" but which, in the ruling class, was an imputation sufficient to permanently ruin a reputation. "Had the accusation been 'Mr. Wilde is a bastard,' shoulders would merely have been shrugged at the noble lord's quixotic ill-temper."
January 5, 2017
Certainly feels dated, and like the ramblings of someone who can't really talk about what he wants to talk about because it would be censored.
____
There is no doubt that swearing has a definite physiological function; for after childhood relief in tears and wailing is rightly discouraged, and groans also considered a sign of extreme weakness. Silence under suffering is usually impossible. The nervous system demands some expression that does not affect towards cowardice and feebleness and, as a nervous stimulant in a crisis, swearing is unequalled. (he was on to something)
It is difficult to determine how far the sex taboo is governed by the sense of reverence, and how far the feeling is one of disgust and puritanic self-hate.
A wise and just man would always endeavour to proportion the vent given to these humours, not only to the degree of them stirring within himself, but to the size and ill intent of the offence upon which they are to fall.
____
There is no doubt that swearing has a definite physiological function; for after childhood relief in tears and wailing is rightly discouraged, and groans also considered a sign of extreme weakness. Silence under suffering is usually impossible. The nervous system demands some expression that does not affect towards cowardice and feebleness and, as a nervous stimulant in a crisis, swearing is unequalled. (he was on to something)
It is difficult to determine how far the sex taboo is governed by the sense of reverence, and how far the feeling is one of disgust and puritanic self-hate.
A wise and just man would always endeavour to proportion the vent given to these humours, not only to the degree of them stirring within himself, but to the size and ill intent of the offence upon which they are to fall.
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January 6, 2010A funny look at social predictions. I enjoyed it. If you read it be sure to look at it with an open mind.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews