Biography Essay

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, not even the truly great," and, again, "minor poetry, so called to differentiate it from major poetry, is the real stuff." At the same time, Graves did almost all those things major poets do. He wrote a great deal of verse (more than fifty volumes) and, through revision and a winnowing that was judicious until his later years, he established a canon. An occasionalist in many tones and modes—love poems, recollections of childhood and war, psychological studies and more detached "observations," satires, grotesques, epigrams—Graves eventually found a central focusing theme in his devotion to a musegoddess who inspires...