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Biography

The poetry of Robert Graves, Robert Richman

Utopian and Fantastic Dualities in Watch the North Wind Rise, Robert H Canary

Grevel Lindop's website

3 chapters from RP Graves' Biography of Graves

from Miranda Seymour's Biography of Graves

Gore Vidal on Robert Graves

Leslie Norris interviews Robert Graves

I, Claudius on American TV

© 1994-2006 St John's College Robert Graves Trust

Robert Graves - A Critical Biography

by

Dr Ian Firla, St John's College, Oxford, Robert Graves Trust

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Contents

Part One - A broad overview of Robert Graves' Life

Part Two - A critical overview of Robert Graves' Works

Part Three - A Survey of Critical Studies for further reference

Part Four - Works Cited and Acknowledgements

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Part One: A broad overview of Robert Graves' Life

Robert Graves, poet, novelist, biographer, mythographer, classical scholar and translator was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, a well-to-do suburb of London, and died in 1985 in Deja, the Majorcan village he had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War) since 1929. Graves married twice. His first marriage to Nancy Nicholson, the daughter of the painter William Nicholson, produced four children: Jenny, David, Catherine and Sam. His second marriage to Beryl Pritchard produced a further four children: William, Lucia, Juan and Tomas.

Graves' career spanned the majority of the 20th century. He was a youthful witness to the evolution of this century's self-conscious notion of its own modernity. He nearly died fighting for a belief in nation and England at a time when modern ideals were displacing the notion of 'for king and country' with sometimes contradictory socio-political ideals. He witnessed the same upheavals and suffered many of the same trials of his avant-garde contemporaries (such as Breton, Soupault and Apollinaire in France and T.E. Hulme, David Jones and Wyndham Lewis in Britain) in the First World War yet, along with other poets like Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, wrote about them very differently. He saw things going wrong again and decided then to say 'Goodbye to All That' and try out life on his own terms.

His own terms led him to domestic crisis as he separated from his wife and his family to follow a dominant and domineering woman and poet. His own terms saw him abandon, not just England, but the modern world, modern living and modernism to move to a rural