Robert Graves Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life and Heritage
Robert Graves was born on 24 July 1895 in Wimbledon, Surrey, England, into a household steeped in letters and song. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves, was an Irish poet and folklorist, and his mother, Amalie von Ranke, came from a German scholarly family. Although not Irish by birth, Graves grew up with a strong sense of Anglo-Irish cultural inheritance through his father and the ballad tradition that surrounded the family. This mixture of influences, English schooling, Irish songs and stories, German scholarship, would leave a lasting mark on his imagination and his approach to myth and poetry.

Education and the First World War
Educated at Charterhouse, he found refuge from the pressures of school in boxing, mountaineering, and, increasingly, poetry. The outbreak of the First World War altered his course decisively. He was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers and sent to the Western Front, where he formed a defining friendship with Siegfried Sassoon. Their companionship and poetic dialogue helped shape Graves's early voice as a war poet. He was badly wounded during the Somme fighting in 1916 and at one point was erroneously reported dead, an episode he later recalled with shocked irony. Through Sassoon he encountered Wilfred Owen and the fierce debates among soldier-poets over truth, pity, and the language of war. In 1917, when Sassoon publicly protested the war's conduct, Graves worked behind the scenes to steer his friend away from a court-martial, a gesture that underlined both his loyalty and his pragmatic understanding of military authority.

Return to Civilian Life and Early Career
Graves returned to Britain to convalesce, married the artist Nancy Nicholson in 1918, and began rebuilding a civilian life under the long shadow of the trenches. He studied at Oxford and published energetic volumes of verse that sought a lyric intensity without sentimentality. The strain of wartime memories mixed with financial pressures pushed him toward reviewing, editing, and writing across genres. His memoir, Goodbye to All That (1929), brought him wide recognition. It portrayed the prewar world, the brutalities of the front, his Oxford years, and the literary circles he navigated with unsparing clarity. The book's commercial success stabilized his circumstances but also alienated some old comrades who disliked its candor.

Laura Riding, Collaboration, and Exile
In the mid-1920s Graves met the American poet Laura Riding, whose fierce intelligence and exacting standards transformed his work. With Riding he embarked on a bold critical and poetic experiment, co-authoring A Survey of Modernist Poetry and advancing a poetics that prized linguistic precision and visionary seriousness. He briefly taught at Cairo University, and with Riding and his family he settled for a time in Majorca, on the island of Mallorca, turning the village of Deya into a working base. Their partnership was intense, collaborative, and often fraught, and their circle included editors, artists, and younger writers who were drawn to the originality of their enterprise. The Spanish Civil War forced them to leave the island; their long partnership ended before the Second World War, and Riding later departed for America.

Historical Fiction and Reputation
The 1930s saw Graves broaden his achievement beyond lyric poetry and memoir. He wrote Lawrence and the Arabs (1927), reflecting a sympathetic engagement with T. E. Lawrence, whose wartime career had fascinated him. Most notably, he turned to Roman history for the linked novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935). With meticulous research, an ear for speech, and a dramatist's sense of character, he transformed the Roman emperor Claudius into an unforgettable narrator. These books secured his international reputation and, in later decades, reached new audiences through celebrated television dramatizations. At the same time, he continued to publish poetry, insisting that the lyric, dedicated to what he called the true Muse, remained his central vocation.

War Years, New Partnerships, and Return to Majorca
During the Second World War and the difficult years immediately after, Graves worked in Britain and the United States, collaborated with the critic and editor Alan Hodge on prose works of cultural history and style, and rethought the lessons of myth and ritual. He formed a partnership with Beryl (later Beryl Graves), whose practical intelligence and devotion steadied his life. After the war they returned to Majorca, making a permanent home in Deya. Their house became a place of pilgrimage for writers, scholars, and students who found in Graves a formidable conversationalist and a generous mentor.

The White Goddess and the Classicist's Turn
The White Goddess (1948) was a turning point in his life as a thinker about poetry. In it, Graves argued that true poetry arises from devotion to a primordial Muse figure, syncretic, feminine, and rooted in ancient ritual. Scholars disputed its methods and conclusions, but poets and artists found it electrifying. The book set the compass for much of his later work and helped frame his idiosyncratic retellings of Greek myth. He authored The Greek Myths (1955), a capacious, readable compendium that integrated narrative with bold interpretive speculation. He also translated classical texts, including Suetonius, and produced an adaptation of the Iliad under the title The Anger of Achilles. Even when he handled history or myth, the lyricist's compression and musicality remained evident.

Poetry, Teaching, and Influence
Through the 1950s and 1960s Graves issued a steady stream of poetry collections in which love, memory, island landscapes, and the discipline of song recur as obsessions. His insistence that the poet serves a demanding Muse shaped a distinctive aesthetics that influenced contemporaries and younger writers alike. From 1961 to 1966 he served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a role that formalized his stature while exposing undergraduates to a practitioner's uncompromising creed. Though skeptical of academic fashions, he lectured with a mixture of wit, dogma, and liberating challenge, urging clarity of diction and the moral seriousness of lyric work.

Family, Friendships, and Literary Community
Throughout his life Graves maintained important friendships and collaborations. Siegfried Sassoon remained a touchstone from the war generation; the remembered presence of Wilfred Owen haunted discussions of poetry's obligations. The early relations with Laura Riding continued to provoke debate among critics about authorship, influence, and the boundaries between collaboration and control. With Beryl Graves he created a hospitable and productive domestic setting that buffered the turbulence of fame. Alan Hodge remained a valued collaborator in prose, while the ghost of T. E. Lawrence, whose life story he had recounted, exemplified the interplay of legend and history that so engaged him. Close readers also traced the imprint of his father, Alfred Perceval Graves, in his love of song and tradition.

Later Years and Legacy
In his final decades Graves divided his days between writing, receiving visitors, and tending to the routines of life in Deya. His health declined, and in advanced age he suffered from cognitive impairment, which gradually removed him from public life. He died in Deya on 7 December 1985. By then he had published scores of volumes, poems foremost, but also novels, criticism, translations, and mythography, that together formed a singular body of work.

Graves's legacy is double. As a war poet and memoirist he left an unsparing account of the generation shattered in the trenches, and as a novelist he reimagined distant history with psychological depth and narrative vigor. As a theorist of poetry he proposed a demanding, controversial vision centered on the Muse that galvanized admirers and exasperated scholars. The people around him, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Laura Riding, Nancy Nicholson, Beryl Graves, Alan Hodge, and the figure of T. E. Lawrence, shaped his art and, in turn, were shaped by it. Rooted in an Anglo-Irish, German-English inheritance and an island home in the Mediterranean, Robert Graves forged a lifetime's conversation between myth and modern life, leaving an influence that has proven durable across poetry, fiction, and the study of ancient stories.

Our collection contains 15 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Love - Poetry - Mental Health.