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The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry
The subject of this series of Clark Lectures given by Robert Graves in Cambridge in 1954-5 was 'Professional Standards in Poetry' and he has supplemented them by a selection of his essays on poetry.
He invites the reader in for a grand, hilarious, and irreverent desmemberment of the demigods of poetry - from Milton to Dylan Thomas.
Graves's central idea is that the crowning privilege the poet enjoys in his freedom from all responsibility except to his Muse - 'the White Goddess' as Graves calls her. But this privilege is also a duty. While he shows a deep and lasting admiration for great poetry, he is mainly concerned - and fiercely impatient -with those artists who, forsaking thier poetic integrity, have chosen rather to truckle to the dubious judges of the non-poetic world: the critics, the publishers, and the readers.
[Taken from the inside cover]
He invites the reader in for a grand, hilarious, and irreverent desmemberment of the demigods of poetry - from Milton to Dylan Thomas.
Graves's central idea is that the crowning privilege the poet enjoys in his freedom from all responsibility except to his Muse - 'the White Goddess' as Graves calls her. But this privilege is also a duty. While he shows a deep and lasting admiration for great poetry, he is mainly concerned - and fiercely impatient -with those artists who, forsaking thier poetic integrity, have chosen rather to truckle to the dubious judges of the non-poetic world: the critics, the publishers, and the readers.
[Taken from the inside cover]
347 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
1 person is currently reading
38 people want to read
About the author
Robert Graves
637 books2,061 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 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 23, 2023
It's always interesting to hear what a poet of note says about poetry - even if Robert Graves belongs to that group, if at all, only by a combination of assertion on his part and courtesy on ours. In fact, he is remembered much more, and rightly, for his prose, particularly The Greek Myths, The White Goddess, and the Claudius books. But that's okay folks! Because he is adamant that a poet writes only for himself, his peers and his 'muse'. If anybody else likes it, okay, but it's not necessarily a good sign.
This book is a treasure-house of poetic lore much of which is very interesting, especially the observations about ancient Irish and Welsh poetic institutions. As with the White Goddess, he doesn't produce any evidence for anything - I guess that would be unpoetic - but, with the magic of technology, some of it can now be looked up using Google (some of it checks out, but some important claims, like that of the pre-Aryan matriarchal society, are entirely unsupported by evidence). As TS Eliot observed, this sense of continuity with the past is vital for a poet if they are going to amount to anything. I'm afraid that, between the impoverishment of poetry in school and uni curriculums (Sylvia flippin Plath!), the influence of rap and the modern 'anyone can play guitar' attitude to the art form, that continuity has been almost entirely lost; and in academia, the attitude of one student cited by Graves that poems are meant to be ‘analysed, not enjoyed’ has become pretty much universal. So far Graves is on firm ground, firmer in fact than when he wrote (or rather spoke, as this book was originally delivered as a series of lectures).
But his judgement, though astute and informed, seems to be almost fatally vitiated by personal considerations and professional jealousy. His opinion of the poets of his own lifetime - most of whom he knew to some degree - seems to be almost entirely based on his personal, private impressions of them. And in assessing those of the past, he is again guided by the degree of similarity to his own circumstances, together with the degree of fit to his own personal theory of poetry, that it must be addressed to the 'muse' or 'goddess'. By this rather arbitrary criterion he dismisses the whole corpus of poetry between 'Marvell, say, and Blake', and the likes of Wordsworth and Tennyson (okay, maybe he's right about Wordsworth; but if In Memoriam isn't poetry, what is?). In terms of form he disapproves of epic, elegy and ode, valuing only 'the lyrical or dramatic highlights of the poet's experience with the goddess'. Pretty much the only one Graves is nice about, after Chaucer, is John Clare: a figure he perhaps thought (and perhaps mistakenly) too minor to threaten him.
(Incidentally Graves claims that Mrs Blount, a possible mistress of Pope's does not find her way into his poetry. This is the one point I have noticed where his poetic knowledge is definitely at fault: I'll eat my hat if she, or some muse of Pope's, does not appear in his poem Eloisa to Abelard.)
It's one thing to say that poetry originated in pagan religion - that is true, likely as not (although we can never know for sure); quite another to say that it must - or even can - keep within those strictures, as conceived in an era when pagan religion has been dead for over a thousand years. And if you say that poetry must primarily bear on love, or the relations between the sexes, you are dismissing not only a lot of modern poetry but Homer, Virgil, the writers of the early Celtic and Norse epics, the Welsh and Gaelic bards, Milton and many others. There is more to poetry, as there is to life, than romantic passion.
Still, Graves knows his stuff and is able to talk interestingly about it; and the debasement to which our literature has been left open, by the lack of the 'professional standards' in poetry for which he called, is surely now obvious to anyone with a molecule of poetic feeling. All good art has to find a middle ground between that which is too restricted (because that stifles creativity) and that which is too free (because without rules and conventions it becomes all about the lowest common denominator; skill and subtlety are lost). Graves was a little too far on one side of that line, we today are a long way off course on the other.
This book is a treasure-house of poetic lore much of which is very interesting, especially the observations about ancient Irish and Welsh poetic institutions. As with the White Goddess, he doesn't produce any evidence for anything - I guess that would be unpoetic - but, with the magic of technology, some of it can now be looked up using Google (some of it checks out, but some important claims, like that of the pre-Aryan matriarchal society, are entirely unsupported by evidence). As TS Eliot observed, this sense of continuity with the past is vital for a poet if they are going to amount to anything. I'm afraid that, between the impoverishment of poetry in school and uni curriculums (Sylvia flippin Plath!), the influence of rap and the modern 'anyone can play guitar' attitude to the art form, that continuity has been almost entirely lost; and in academia, the attitude of one student cited by Graves that poems are meant to be ‘analysed, not enjoyed’ has become pretty much universal. So far Graves is on firm ground, firmer in fact than when he wrote (or rather spoke, as this book was originally delivered as a series of lectures).
But his judgement, though astute and informed, seems to be almost fatally vitiated by personal considerations and professional jealousy. His opinion of the poets of his own lifetime - most of whom he knew to some degree - seems to be almost entirely based on his personal, private impressions of them. And in assessing those of the past, he is again guided by the degree of similarity to his own circumstances, together with the degree of fit to his own personal theory of poetry, that it must be addressed to the 'muse' or 'goddess'. By this rather arbitrary criterion he dismisses the whole corpus of poetry between 'Marvell, say, and Blake', and the likes of Wordsworth and Tennyson (okay, maybe he's right about Wordsworth; but if In Memoriam isn't poetry, what is?). In terms of form he disapproves of epic, elegy and ode, valuing only 'the lyrical or dramatic highlights of the poet's experience with the goddess'. Pretty much the only one Graves is nice about, after Chaucer, is John Clare: a figure he perhaps thought (and perhaps mistakenly) too minor to threaten him.
(Incidentally Graves claims that Mrs Blount, a possible mistress of Pope's does not find her way into his poetry. This is the one point I have noticed where his poetic knowledge is definitely at fault: I'll eat my hat if she, or some muse of Pope's, does not appear in his poem Eloisa to Abelard.)
It's one thing to say that poetry originated in pagan religion - that is true, likely as not (although we can never know for sure); quite another to say that it must - or even can - keep within those strictures, as conceived in an era when pagan religion has been dead for over a thousand years. And if you say that poetry must primarily bear on love, or the relations between the sexes, you are dismissing not only a lot of modern poetry but Homer, Virgil, the writers of the early Celtic and Norse epics, the Welsh and Gaelic bards, Milton and many others. There is more to poetry, as there is to life, than romantic passion.
Still, Graves knows his stuff and is able to talk interestingly about it; and the debasement to which our literature has been left open, by the lack of the 'professional standards' in poetry for which he called, is surely now obvious to anyone with a molecule of poetic feeling. All good art has to find a middle ground between that which is too restricted (because that stifles creativity) and that which is too free (because without rules and conventions it becomes all about the lowest common denominator; skill and subtlety are lost). Graves was a little too far on one side of that line, we today are a long way off course on the other.
June 8, 2022
Robert Graves is such an interesting character. Usually classed as one of the British First World War poets, he never really fitted into that group (if it ever really was something that homogeneous). He outlived them all, famously spending most of his life living in Majorca with a succession of female muses, who informed much of his poetry. He was a prolific writer, much influenced by the ancient gods about which he wrote with some insight. He himself very much thought of himself as a poet, and has left behind a sizable body of work. As of the writing of this review (2021), I think it's fair to state that it is still unclear whether his poetry will stand the test of time as well as some of his contemporaries. However, he was an insightful, interesting and in some ways eccentric critic of poetry and the art and craft of its creation.
The Crowning Privilege is a collection of his six Clark Lectures given at Cambridge in the 1950s, along with other essays on poetry that he had published up until that time. The theme of his Clark Lectures was "professional standards in English poetry", and Graves took that theme in its broadest sense to give a personal view on the history of English poetry, the good and the bad, and some advice on how to go about being a poet.
Graves had his own views on the good and the bad in English poetry, with the bad being very much the "French" style of the restoration, with Milton and Pope particularly in his sights. His beliefs on following the muse leads him to disparage any poetry that is not born of inspiration, and any metre or rhyme that is artificially imposed on a work. His views I think are best shown with some selected quotations from the lectures:
"English poets do no wear wigs; they wear their own hair - while it lasts. And the force inspiring them is love, controlled by reason; not rhetoric controlled by timidity; not correctness controlled by cynicism."
"They must remember that the source of all poetry is not reason, but the wind of inspiration."
"It is an axiom among poets that if one trusts whole-heartedly to poetic magic, one will be sure to solve any merely verbal problem or else discover that the verbal problem is hiding an imprecision in poetic thought. I say magic, since the act of composition occurs in a sort of trance, distinguishable from dream only because the critical faculties are not dormant, but on the contrary, more acute than normally."
"It is unprofessional conduct to say: 'When next I write a poem I shall use sonnet form' - because the theme is by definition unforeseeable, and theme chooses metre. A poet should not be conscious of the metrical pattern of a poem he is writing until the first three or four lines have appeared;"
Graves was at time a harsh, but always inquiring critic of poetry, and the second half of this book, which contains essays from various sources, contains essays that show Graves' ability to closely read Mother Goose rhymes or Tom O'Bedlam and to be able to reconstruct the original verse by stripping out the mis-hearings of the past, or separate the strands of several poems that have merged into one.
He was also a very close reader of the Romantic Poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, and explains why he thinks that Coleridge was more the poet of those two, as he followed the calling of the Muse, from whom Wordsworth turned away. In twelve pages, his essay The Ghost of Milton not only destroys any thought that Milton was a nice person, but also convincingly shows the reader that Milton was more of a self-aggrandizer than a poet, despite the overpowering nature of some of his verse: as Graves notes, the purpose of verse is not to overpower, but to raise up. Milton is hoist on the petard of his vanity and ambition.
Even if Graves' poetry is not for you, I suggest that it is well worthwhile to read some of his criticism - like all good work, it drives you to re-evaluate what you thought you know.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
The Crowning Privilege is a collection of his six Clark Lectures given at Cambridge in the 1950s, along with other essays on poetry that he had published up until that time. The theme of his Clark Lectures was "professional standards in English poetry", and Graves took that theme in its broadest sense to give a personal view on the history of English poetry, the good and the bad, and some advice on how to go about being a poet.
Graves had his own views on the good and the bad in English poetry, with the bad being very much the "French" style of the restoration, with Milton and Pope particularly in his sights. His beliefs on following the muse leads him to disparage any poetry that is not born of inspiration, and any metre or rhyme that is artificially imposed on a work. His views I think are best shown with some selected quotations from the lectures:
"English poets do no wear wigs; they wear their own hair - while it lasts. And the force inspiring them is love, controlled by reason; not rhetoric controlled by timidity; not correctness controlled by cynicism."
"They must remember that the source of all poetry is not reason, but the wind of inspiration."
"It is an axiom among poets that if one trusts whole-heartedly to poetic magic, one will be sure to solve any merely verbal problem or else discover that the verbal problem is hiding an imprecision in poetic thought. I say magic, since the act of composition occurs in a sort of trance, distinguishable from dream only because the critical faculties are not dormant, but on the contrary, more acute than normally."
"It is unprofessional conduct to say: 'When next I write a poem I shall use sonnet form' - because the theme is by definition unforeseeable, and theme chooses metre. A poet should not be conscious of the metrical pattern of a poem he is writing until the first three or four lines have appeared;"
Graves was at time a harsh, but always inquiring critic of poetry, and the second half of this book, which contains essays from various sources, contains essays that show Graves' ability to closely read Mother Goose rhymes or Tom O'Bedlam and to be able to reconstruct the original verse by stripping out the mis-hearings of the past, or separate the strands of several poems that have merged into one.
He was also a very close reader of the Romantic Poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, and explains why he thinks that Coleridge was more the poet of those two, as he followed the calling of the Muse, from whom Wordsworth turned away. In twelve pages, his essay The Ghost of Milton not only destroys any thought that Milton was a nice person, but also convincingly shows the reader that Milton was more of a self-aggrandizer than a poet, despite the overpowering nature of some of his verse: as Graves notes, the purpose of verse is not to overpower, but to raise up. Milton is hoist on the petard of his vanity and ambition.
Even if Graves' poetry is not for you, I suggest that it is well worthwhile to read some of his criticism - like all good work, it drives you to re-evaluate what you thought you know.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
October 31, 2007
Contempt for Alexander Pope, and a strange reverence for John Skelton. After 20 years I still remember what Graves says in this book about Pope: "Up the ladder went this sedulous ape, continually turning about to bite and scratch those below him."
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews