Graves, Robert (Ranke) (1895–1985)

English poet and writer. He was severely wounded on the Somme in World War I, and his frank autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929) contains outstanding descriptions of the war. Collected Poems (1975) contained those verses he wanted preserved, some of which were influenced by the American poet Laura Riding, with whom he lived for some years. His fiction includes two historical novels of imperial Rome, I Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934). His most significant critical work is The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948, revised edition 1966).

Graves was born in London, the son of Alfred Perceval Graves, and educated at Oxford. During World War I he served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, in the same regiment as the writer and poet Siegfried Sassoon. In 1926 he was professor of English in Cairo. Living in Mallorca, Spain for the next few years, he ran the Seizin Press in partnership with Laura Riding. After World War II he went back to the island. He was professor of poetry at Oxford 1961–66.

Graves first achieved notice for his war poetry, but he largely rejected his early poetry and developed much further in his later verse. The poems of his maturity (1926–39), are technically confident, rhetorically simple, and are among the finest of modern love poems. After World War II, he became increasingly interested in Sufist and Eastern religious philosophy and mythology, the subject of many of his later poems. His works include Collected Poems (1965), Poems 1965–68 (1968), Poems 1968–1970 (1970), and Poems 1970–72 (1972). He also wrote Count Belisarius (1938), a further novel set in classical Rome, Greek Myths (1955), Hebrew Myths (1963), and Collected Short Stories (1965). He translated The Golden Ass (1949), Suetonius' Twelve Caesars (1959), and Terence's Comedies (1962).