The early poetry of Robert Graves : the goddess beckons
Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of post-war British society. In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western idea of reality-reason and predictability. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves's early poems of a figure he later called "The White Goddess," a being at once terrifying and glorious, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves's family, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski argues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy
Print Book, English, 2002
University of Texas Press, Austin, 2002
Biography
xvi, 174 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
9780292743434, 0292743432
47922899
The lunatic, the love, and the poet
The lunatic: war
The lover in the nursery
The poet
Machine generated contents note: CHAPTER 1 THE LUNATIC, THE LOVER, AND THE POET CHAPTER 2 THE LUNATIC: WAR CHAPTER 3 THE LUNATIC: AFTER THE WAR CHAPTER 4 THE LOVER IN THE NURSERY CHAPTER 5 THE LOVER CHAPTER 6 THE POET