Customer Reviews (1) 
A CHOSEN WRITER
A CHOSEN WRITER
REVIEW:Graves, Robert.The Poems of Robert Graves (Chosen by Himself).Garden City, New York:Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958.
I have read Robert Graves since I first encountered him in undergraduate school.I like him and have always liked him for his works, manner, intellect and his bravery in WWI where he was shot and left for dead. As a writer, I have learned from him.I learned that the waste basket is my best friend.I learned how to cope as a writer who is responsible for making his own way in the world.I was confirmed in my intuitions about "thinking poetically."I could not follow Graves in his routine of writing, though.He composed in bed, something I could not bear to do.It seems so disorganized, but he was successful at it.
Robert Graves' solution to the problem of the poet for the independence necessary to practice his art was to move to the island of Majorca in the Mediterranean. He lived frugally on that idyllic island, and made his living by writing what are considered historical novels, but which he called "historical reconstructions."Graves became renowned for these works.The most famous of them were his two volumes on the Roman emperor Claudius, entitled:I, Claudius, and Claudius the God.The essence of these two books was televised in a BBC series in 1976.(I watched them, but must say that the characterization of Roman patricians of the empire was inadequate.They were made to speak and act like petulant Englishmen.Rather, I would assume that Roman patricians would behave like cultured, literate and intelligent mobsters.)
Besides the works on Claudius, Graves wrote many other novels of recreated history, among them:Hercules, My Shipmate, about the voyage of the Argo; Homer's Daughter, Graves' working out of his belief that the Odyssey was written by a woman; King Jesus, about epochal events in the Mideast 2000 years ago; Watch the North Wind Rise, a utopian novel that took place on the island of Crete; and his two novels about North America, Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, and Proceed, Sergeant Lamb, the adventures of a British noncommissioned officer in the New World in the Colonial Era.
My personal favorite of the historical reconstructions of Robert Graves is Count Belisarius, which concerns the life and wars of the famous general who re-conquered Italy for the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian the Great.I prefer this work because of my personal background and because it involves an era of the past that has been totally forgotten by westerners, both European and American.
As fine as the above works are, though, Robert Graves considered himself a poet, and only a poet, ---and so we must judge him on that basis.
Early in his writing life, Robert Graves sold all that he had and bought the full set of the Oxford English Dictionary, as he informed us in a memoir. He perused the OED assiduously and read the complete entry for every word that interested him.It was his favorite reading material.As a result, Graves knew more about words and their secondary, tertiary and associated meanings than any other poet, at least of his day, and most certainly of today.Of course, his lexicographical knowledge affected his poems, and in a manner that I will explicate.
I have the paperback 1958 Doubleday Anchor Book of the collection of Graves' poems that I use as a reference that I bought long ago.It is falling apart not only from my use but from age.Over decades, I have checked off 49 lyrics for re-reading out of 291 titles.(I may add or subtract a few poems as per reading for my review.)Reading Graves' collection, and especially those poems I had checked as of special interest, I determine that my opinion of them over the years has not changed.As interesting and as well-wrought as are the poems, I find something missing in them, ---and that is the fire of passion.I believe Graves' poems are over-controlled, and specifically because he knew more about the interconnections among English words than any poet perhaps ever.
I will point out instances of my perception about the poems of Robert Graves in the poem Ulysses that appears on page 79 in my copy.I give the poem as follows.
ULYSSES
To the much-tossed Ulysses, never done
With women whether gowned as wife or whore,
Penelope and Circe seemed as one:
She like a whore made his lewd fancies run,
And wifely she a hero to him bore.
Their counter-changings terrified his way:
They were the clashing rocks, Symplegades,
Scylla and Charybdis too were they;
Now they were storms frosting the sea with spray
And now the lotus island's drunken ease.
They multiplied into the Siren's throng,
Forewarned by fear of whom he stood bound fast
Hand and foot helpless to the vessel's mast,
Yet would not stop his ears:daring their song
He groaned and sweated till that shore was past.
One, two and many:flesh had made him blind,
Flesh had one pleasure only in the act,
Flesh set one purpose only in the mind---
Triumph of flesh and afterwards to find
Still those same terrors wherewith flesh was racked.
His wiles were witty and his fame far known,
Every king's daughter sought him for her own,
Yet he was nothing to be won or lost.
All hands to him with Ithaca:love-tossed
He loathed the fraud, yet would not bed alone.
I will mention some aspects of Graves' poem to my point, though my comments are not intended to be a complete prosodic parsing. Immediately, you will perceive how balanced is the poem, even to the punctuation and indentation of the lines.Firstly, Graves counterbalances Penelope and Circe, wife and whore, respectively.In this context, consider the poet's use of the word "gown," which can be either a formal or ballroom gown, or a dressing gown, appropriate either to Penelope or Circe, respectively.But then, Penelope and Circe are perfectly unbalanced, as the poet is perfunctory about Penelope the wife (and note that the word "bore" he uses with her has more than one meaning, as I assume he intends that she is "boring"); but Circe has all the attention of the poet, as she "...made his lewd fancies run...," which means of course that she turned him on, as we say these days.Thus the poem is balanced by being both balanced and unbalanced.The poem is about the lust of Ulysses, as is noted in stanza four where the word "flesh" is used in all five lines of it.Further, the word "flesh" has multiple meanings, and it would be instructive to investigate at least five of the meanings relative to their use in each line.One of the meanings of "flesh" refers to our species, humankind, and Ulysses' interaction with Circe is one of humanity and not simply brutish.
Notice also, regarding the balance of the poem, how the pairs of clashing rocks, the Symplegades and Scylla and Charybdis, are used in the second stanza.The Symplegades became fixed in Classical legend, but Scylla and Charybdis continued to clash. The fixed rocks represent Penelope.(In addition, I see in the word "Symplegades" a hidden rhyme with "Hades," which Graves of course would assume, as the world of Ancient Greece was intimately known to him.)Graves further, in this stanza, balances the storms of the sea with the ease of Circe's lotus island.In the first line of the poem, Ulysses is described as "much-tossed," and as by the sea and his eventful life.It is matched by "love-tossed" in the next to last line.A further balance is found in the last line, where while Ulysses loathes the fraud (of being unfaithful to his wife), it does not stop him from going to bed with Circe.
Graves's fine poem could continue to be explicated, as I have done. But I will note a final instance of his skill.If you count the lines starting from both the beginning and end of the poem, you arrive at line 3 of the 3rd stanza.The final word of this line is "mast."This word in its placement explains the entire poem, in its balance, its theme and its deep structure.A mast is a masculine symbol, of course, the pole of a man, and Ulysses is tied to it, as he is bound by his sensuality.This much is easily seen.Another meaning of "mast" is the fruit of the oak and beech trees used as feed for pigs.Of course, Circe changed Ulysses crew to pigs, and made him piggish, too, as a boar to rhyme with "whore," as she is described, and to balance with "bore," in reference to Penelope.The ultimate derivation of the word "flesh" is from Old Norse and means "bacon," and so we are back to swine.We should think of Ulysses tied to the mast and tossed by the sea, his life and love with its tip thrashing about, ---in love-making with Circe, of course.This is concrete and "action-packed," so to say.
For Graves, the placement of the word "mast" as the axis of the poem, and for its secondary meaning is not accidental or incidental.He knew precisely what he was doing.While such deep structure in the poem is admirable, it also takes away from spontaneity and passion, which I would have thought was of primary concern in such a poem.(Few modern poems have such structure, but operate with surface meanings, ---which is not necessarily unacceptable.Deep structure, though, makes a poem thick.)
It is with such considerations that I consider Graves as a poet to be more rational and controlled than passionate, however excellently so.The over control of his poems is the defining principle of them.Graves supposed that a poem should be constructed like a cat's cradle and intricately connected at each and every point.I would recommend that a poem be interrelated like a tangle of fishhooks found in a sports store.You can pick them all up of a piece, but when you shake them, some fall off.I suggest that life, passion and art are like this, and not absolutely interconnected.I hasten to add that Graves is a poet worth reading in the tradition, or I would not discuss him.
There is one poem that Robert Graves wrote that I consider to be passionate and ultimately moving whatever its deep structure.It is the poem The White Goddess that appears on page 237 in his book of poems that he selected as his best work.It first appeared in Graves' critical work:The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, in dedication to her.I give the poem as follows.
THE WHITE GODDESS
All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean---
In scorn of which we sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom we desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.
It was a virtue not to stay,
To go our headstrong and heroic way
Seeking her out at the volcano's head,
Among pack ice, or where the track had faded
Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers;
Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's,
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips.
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips.
The sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir
Will celebrate with green the Mother,
And every song-bird shout awhile for her;
But we are gifted, even in November
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
I believe this magnificent poem of Robert Graves to be immortal in the tradition of English verse.
(TRC 10-09)
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