ROBERT GRAVES: AN ENGLISH POET IN DEIÀ, MAJORCA

Robert Graves

Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895-7 December 1985), also known as Robert Ranke Graves and most commonly Robert Graves, was an English poet, novelist, critic and classicist. In a way similar to Oscar Wilde, Robert Graves was a Celticist and student of Irish mythology, by the influence of his father Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet, with William Wilde, these families were inheritors of the Gaelic revival. He produced more than 140 works.

Graves's poems, together with his translations and innovative analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths; his memoir of his early life, including his role in the First World War, Good-Bye to All That; and his speculative study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, have never been out of print. Irish literature deeply affected Graves' White Goddess theories, specifically the genre aisling.

More information: Fundació Robert Graves (English)

He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius, King Jesus, The Golden Fleece and Count Belisarius. He also was a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular, for their clarity and entertaining style. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

Graves was born into a middle-class family in Wimbledon, then part of Surrey, now part of London. He was the third of five children born to Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931), an Irish school inspector, Gaelic scholar and the author of the popular song Father O'Flynn, and his second wife, Amalie von Ranke (1857–1951).

Robert Graves in Deià, Majorca

At school, Graves was enrolled as Robert von Ranke Graves and in Germany his books are published under that name but before and during the First World War, the name caused him difficulties. In August 1916 an officer who disliked him spread the rumour that he was the brother of a captured German spy who had assumed the name Carl Graves. The problem resurfaced in a minor way in the Second World War, when a suspicious rural policeman blocked his appointment to the Special Constabulary.

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 up with his wife under highly emotional circumstances, at one point Riding attempted suicide, before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. 

More information: La Casa de Robert Graves (English)

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); both had great influence on modern literary criticism, particularly New Criticism. Graves and Riding left Majorca in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and in 1939, they moved to the United States, taking lodging in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

Robert Graves

On 11 November 1985, Graves was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. 

The inscription on the stone was written by friend and fellow Great War poet Wilfred Owen. It reads: My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Of the 16 poets, Graves was the only one still living at the time of the commemoration ceremony.

During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss. By his 80th birthday in 1975, he had come to the end of his working life. He survived for ten more years, in an increasingly dependent condition, until he died from heart failure on 7 December 1985 at 90. He was buried the next morning in the small churchyard on a hill at Deià, at the site of a shrine that had once been sacred to The White Goddess of Pelion.

More information: Illes Balears

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers. 

Robert Graves