On this day, July 24, 1895, poet Robert Graves (1895-1985) was born in Wimbledon, near London. One of ten children, Robert was influenced by his mother’s puritanical beliefs and his father’s love of Celtic poetry and myth. As a young man, he was more interested in boxing and mountain climbing than studying, although poetry later sustained him through a disruptive adolescence.
In 1913 Graves won a scholarship to continue his studies at St. John’s College, Oxford, but in August 1914 he enlisted as a junior officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was injured in the Somme offensive in 1916. While convalescing, he published his first collection of poetry, Over the Brazier. By 1917, though still an active serviceman, Graves had published three volumes. Graves was friends with fellow war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. In 1918, he spent a year in the trenches, where he was again severely wounded. In January 1918, at the age of twenty-two, traumatized by the war, he went to Oxford with his wife and took a position at St. John’s College. Graves’s early volumes of poetry, like those of his contemporaries, deal with natural beauty and rural pleasures and with the consequences of the First World War. After meeting the American poet and theorist Laura Riding in 1926, Graves’s poetry underwent a significant transformation. In 1927, Graves and his first wife separated permanently, and in 1929 he published Goodbye to All That, an autobiography that announced his psychological accommodation with the residual horror of his war experiences. Shortly afterward, he departed to Majorca with Laura Riding. During this period, he evolved his theory of poetry as spiritually cathartic to both the poet and the reader. At the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Graves and Riding fled Majorca, eventually settling in America. In 1939, Laura Riding left Graves for the writer Schuyler Jackson; one year later Graves began a relationship with Beryl Hodge that was to last until his death. After World War II, Graves returned to Majorca, where he lived with Hodge and continued to write. By the 1950s, Graves had won an enormous international reputation as a poet, novelist, literary scholar, and translator. From 1961 to 1966, Graves returned to England to serve as a professor of poetry at Oxford. From the 1960s until his death, Robert Graves frequently exchanged letters with Spike Milligan, many of their letters to each other are collected in the book, Dear Robert, Dear Spike. In the 1970s his productivity fell off; and the last decade of his life was lost in silence and senility. Robert Graves died in Majorca in 1985, at the age of ninety.
On 11 November 1985, Graves was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ 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, he was to die the following month.
In the poem below’ “Not Dead” Graves is remembering his son David who died in the Second World War, but this particular remembering also reveals his belief of the resurrection of the young man as a spiritual being.
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