The English poet Robert Graves (1895-1985) was also a very productive novelist, mythographer, critic and historian, with over 130 books to his credit. He was once nominated for the Nobel Prize. Robert Ranke Graves was the son of a minor poet and...

Robert Graves may well be remembered as the preeminent minor poet of the twentieth century. He would not be disturbed by the label. "Nothing," he said in his sixties in a lecture on the legitimate criticism of poetry, "is better than the truly good,...

On his death in 1985 The Times of London wrote of Robert Graves: "He will be remembered for his achievements as a prose stylist, historical novelist and memoirist, but above all as the great paradigm of the dedicated poet, 'the greatest love poet in...

Today is Easter Sunday, April 8, the 98th day of 2007. There are 267 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit his 715th career home run in a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers,...

Oxford Addresses on Poetry discusses "the hard core of our English poetic inheritance, namely poems inspired by the Muse rather than commissioned by Apollo, God of Reason," to quote Graves's foreword. "A good many of the younger University members agreed with me that such poems are alone likely to survive concentrated pressures from commercialized or politically slanted literature and entertainment," Graves observes, and continues: "The ornate academic Victorian tra...

In a brief but sharp review of Graves' The Greek Myths,… [H. J. Rose complains] that Graves includes "sentimentalities of his own devising, legitimate enough in a work of the imagination, but quite out of place in a handbook of mythology, where a story should be told as the authorities tell it, or epitomized from their account." (p. 145) The predicament can be summarized simply: the contemporary mythographer inherits a formidable equipment of technology and scholarship, and can n...

[The framework of Watch the North Wind Rise] exhibits a duality characteristic of the genre of the "fantastic," [and] it provides an example of the way in which similar dualities may be found in utopian works…. (pp. 248-49) Although set in a future alternative world, Watch the North Wind Rise maintains a certain tension between natural and supernatural explanations for what Venn-Thomas sees in New Crete, as well as for the dream-journey which takes him there. The poet-magicians who have...