LARB Reviews the Newest Biography of Robert Graves

Matt Keeley hands us the keys to Robert Graves's mythologies at Los Angeles Book Review. There's some Graves-mania going round, it seems: "The independent press Seven Stories is now halfway through its multi-year Graves Project, which 'brings back into print 14 of Robert Graves’ most enduring works," writes Keeley, who goes on to review Jean Moorcroft Wilson's new biography of the poet, Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-bye to All That (1895–1929). More:

In her account of his early years, Moorcroft Wilson nonetheless gives us a hint to the impetus of The White Goddess. She describes Graves’s refutation, with citations from the classics, of a teacher who suspected he’d formed a homosexual liasion with a younger student as “an early example of Graves in lecturing mode, of his firm belief in the rightness of his position and his fearlessness, at times recklessness, in the face of opposition.” Graves was a lifelong lecturer, and this tendency culminated with the publication of The White Goddess. This massive survey first appeared in 1948, when Graves was in his early 50s, though you could say he never quite finished it: subsequent editions were revised, expanded, clarified, and appended.

Graves believed he had composed a genuine Key to All Mythologies, and a few on the esoteric and occult fringes still agree with him. To make short work of a long book, The White Goddess argues that humanity once worshipped a three-aspected moon goddess, but that in time immemorial, patriarchal revolutions the world over suppressed her. In a speech given a few years post-publication, Graves, never humble, characterized the “inspiration” that descended upon him: “I seem to have stumbled on the central secret of neolithic and Bronze Age religious faith, which makes sense of many otherwise inexplicable myths and religious customs.” The innumerable “myths and customs” encountered in his investigations include medieval Welsh riddle poetry, forbidden druidic alphabets, the chthonic associations of the elder tree, “the Orphic tree-alphabet,” the cults of Apollo and Minerva, the isle of Avalon in Arthurian myth, and much more. Graves emphasizes the literary significance of his enlightenment, arguing that genuine poets are unknowing Goddess worshippers who reject Apollonian rationality (Apollo is a sort of anti-Goddess in Graves’s scheme) and give ecstatic, if uncomprehended, homage to the mother of poetry...

Read on at LARB.