Research Paper On Robert Graves

Gray Livingston
Vicino
AP Lit
10 March 2015
Robert Graves On July 24th, 1895, in Wimbledon, near London, England, a young boy was born to Alfred Percival Graves and Amalie von Ranke. This boy grew up as a normal English citizen, with eight brothers and sisters, and one day he went off to fight in a War unlike any he had ever seen, and he would never be the same. Robert Ranke Graves was that boy’s name, and he grows up to be one of the famed Modernists. These Modernists were also called the “Lost Generation,” and represented a shift in the morals of the world. Modernism is characterized by a lack personal emotion, a new distaste for man, and an alienation from mankind as a whole. Robert Graves was a modernist in that he rejected the standard
World War I brought with it the largest change to mankind since its creation, and literature greatly reflected this change. Robert Graves saw more change than the average soldier. Before he enlisted in 1914, Graves was attending a famous English school called Charterhouse. Had Graves enjoyed his time in this school, he may have never gone to war, but fortunately for his worldwide fan base, Graves hated Charterhouse. He hated the athletic based, slovenly nature of the boys that attended, and for that reason he was quick to join the war on the European mainland (“Robert Graves”). Going through the war and experiencing all the horrors that came with it, not the least of which was an artillery shell that almost killed him, changed Graves forever. The war not only directly changed Graves’s life, it also changed his view on life. In his poem, “Two Fusiliers,” he talks about two soldiers that have been bonded by blood. Before the War, Graves only wrote recreationally. His first book of poetry, Over the Brazier, was a collection of realistic war poetry unlike the world had ever seen. Graves was at the start of the worlds changing view of war, he was there at the beginning of Modernism
Graves’s first wife was Nancy Nicholson, whom he met while having surgery performed on his nose. Nancy was a strong feminist, and these convictions were believed, “…to have adumbrated the coming of the White Goddess. The marriage's loss was the myth's gain: one example of what to make of a diminished thing” (“Robert Graves”). The White Goddess was a muse that provided almost exclusively the subject of Graves’s writings from the late 50’s until the end of his writing career. As Graves put it, she was, “ ‘…the ancient power of fright and lust--the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death…’ ” (Graves in “Robert Graves”). Graves finally settled down with Laura Riding in 1929, and the couple moved to Majorca, Spain where Graves was free to write his poetry in peace