A Poet on His Calling
The Common Asphodel. By Robert Graves. (Hamish Hamilton. 15s.)
Ir is surely a comment on the taste of our time that Mr. Robert Graves, a poet of real originality with a flavour as tart and un- mistakable as a damson's, should be preferred by the general public as a biographer and writer of historical novels, " a profession," as he himself says, " which I found more easily reconcilable than most with being a poet." His scholarship and gift for presenting history have enabled him to keep " an oath of poetic independence " which he swore on leaving the Army at the end of the First World War. He has no illusions about the hardness of the poet's life ; the poet must be as tough as the symbolic asphodel, which is not "a yellow flower mentioned by Homer as growing in Elysium, on soft beds of which the souls of the just were believed, in his time, to rest their weary limbs," but a tall, tough-stemmed sturdy plant growing wild "on the poorest soil in most parts of the Mediterranean." Likc the poet, it has sovereign virtues and " magical associations with life, doom, immortality."
Mr. Graves's collected essays, written between 1922 and 1949, and now revised for publication in book form, are concerned with the true nature of the poet and the place of poetry in a world that is certainly "harsh, rocky soil" for the asphodel of genius. He writes with wit, prejudice, insight and perversity, and his book is at once so absorbing and so exasperating that the reader is quickly stung into mental alertness. If there is a certain arrogance in Mr. Graves's critical manner, he himself declares that " the arrogance of the poet is based on his courageous dedication to a thankless profession, the difficulties and humiliations of which he alone fully realises." And it is in the more general -passages about poetry that he is most penetrating, tempting one to the belief that only poets are capable of the purest criticism. Some of the material in this book on the great poets of the past is extraordinarily interesting. Mr. Graves's chapter on The Sources of " The Tempest"; his understanding of Keats (especially his beautiful passage on " The Eve of St. Agnes " in the essay The Grosser Senses) ; his original speculations on the relation of the poet's eyesight to his imagination ; his brilliant analysis of the traditional Loving Mad Tom—which he believes may possibly be, at least partly, the work of Shakespeare—all delight the reader, and not less for the element of provocation in them. The studies of modernist poetry, written during the literary partnership with Miss Laura Riding, are hardly less stimulating, but in these Mr. Graves appears more deliberately wilful and opinionated, occasionally descending to an almost nursery rudeness—all the more to be deplored as this form of literary bad manners is on the increase among critics of lesser gifts than Mr. Graves—towards such distinguished poets as Mr. W. B. Yeats, Dr. Edith Sitwell and Mr. T. S. Eliot, whom, however, he allows to be " a master craftsman of musical verse." He defends his essay on The Perfect Modern Lyric as "excusably savage," and one cannot deny that it is very witty, but the chapter on Kipling is so complete a caricature as to lose its effect. It is, perhaps, in The Poets of World War II, which might more appropriately be called The Poets of World War I, that he is at his weakest. He dismisses carelessly the remarkable promise of the late Sidney Keyes, and does not appear to know the work of several other gifted way poets, in- cluding Roy Fuller, Keith Douglas and Hamish Henderson, for which there is no excuse as the essay has been recently revised.
Mr. Graves seems to have more sympathy with some of the living American poets than with his English contemporaries ; he interprets with skill some of the poems of Mr. E. E. Cummings, praises the sincerity of Robert Frost, and pays a generous and well-deserved tribute to that fine poet Mr. John Crowe Ransom, whose selected poems are now happily available in an English edition. It is im- possible to read The Common Asphodel without a continual wish to contradict and argue with the author ; but it is also impossible to read it without stimulating pleasure, even delight in its wit and liveliness, and in the firm texture of its excellent prose. The reader will be surprised to find, as he closes the finished book, how much part he has taken in it, how his perceptions have been quickened as if by one of those long, sometimes fierce- but always enthralling arguments with a gifted friend which are so valuable a part of aesthetic
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