Robert Graves

Robert Ranke Graves (1895–1985) was an English poet, novelist and critic who spent much of his later life in Spain. Known for his work on Greek myth, he wrote in English across most of the twentieth century. Today he is best remembered for his historical novels and his translations of Latin and Greek authors, though his output exceeded one hundred and forty works.

He was born into an upper-middle-class family in Wimbledon. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves, was an Irish schools inspector and a scholar of Gaelic culture, and his mother came from a German family connected to the historian Leopold von Ranke. As a child he nearly died of double pneumonia, and on three occasions his doctors despaired of his lungs. At school he took up boxing and began writing poetry. His German-sounding surname caused him trouble during the war, when in 1916 an officer who disliked him spread a rumour that he was the brother of a German spy.

When war broke out he enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, appeared in 1916, and he soon became known as one of the first writers to describe frontline experience realistically. That same year, badly wounded at the Somme by a shell fragment that pierced a lung, he was officially reported dead, but he recovered. During his convalescence at Oxford he befriended Siegfried Sassoon, whom he later helped to avoid a court martial after Sassoon publicly protested against the war. Graves himself suffered from neurasthenia, though he was never hospitalised for it.

After the war he returned to Oxford and began writing to earn a living. His breakthrough came with I, Claudius (1934), which, together with its sequel, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He went on to write further historical novels and to produce translations of classical texts that remain admired for their clarity. His memoir Good-Bye to All That and his speculative study The White Goddess, on poetic inspiration and an ancient goddess, show recurring interests in history, myth and power. His prose is direct and unadorned.

His legacy lies in the modern historical novel and in the popular readership for Greek myth, helped in large part by the television adaptation of I, Claudius. Some of his theories in The White Goddess have been challenged by specialists, but his novels and translations are still widely read.