Graves—The '65 Edition

Collected Poemi 1965. By Robert Graves. (Cassell, 42s.)

ROBERT GRAVES is an anomaly—a lyric poet gifted with a flawless ear, yet also one who reads his own verse as if it positively bored him, a historical novelist who has more respect for fancy than for truth in his re-creation of past charac- ters and situations, a scholar who often lets a keen imagination overrule a fastidious concern with facts. Mr. Graves's best and most lasting work is his poetry, and he himself would be the first person to admit this. Almost every absurdity, and even injustice (because, as a literary critic, Mr. Graves is surely sometimes extremely unfair), must be forgiven a poet who can write:

Stirring suddenly from long hibernation, I knew myself once more a poet Guarded by timeless principalities . . .

0 gracious, lofty, shone against from under, Back-of-the-mind-far clouds like towers; And you, sudden warm airs that blow Before the expected season of new blossom, While sheep still gnaw at roots and lambless go- (`Mid-Winter Waking.')

Anyone who has known the sudden return of

poetic power, the surge and swell of speech and language, will understand precisely what Robert Graves meahs in these marvellous lines. For the truth is that though this poet has admitted he often works through many drafts and versions of one short poem, he is, none the less, a very natural poet. By this 1 do not mean that he is amateurish or uncultivated—far from it—but rather that he writes always freshly and spon- taneously, of deep-down, basic things, such as love, hatred, anger, fatherhood, superstition, and so on Love, however, has always been Mr. Graves's predominant theme, and if his earlier poems seem more various, and therefore perhaps more interesting, than his more recent ones, this is because he has now brought his numerous poetic gifts to bear on the one subject which has always, at heart, been his main concern. I mean the love, usually reciprocated, of man for woman.

To celebrate his seventieth birthday, Mr. Graves has brought out this magnificent volume of Collected Poems. There is a bitter-sweet quality about the beautiful, late love poetry which reminds one of. Yeats's lines:

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention on my old age.

What else have I to spur me into song?

Mr. Graves does not admire Yeats (this we have learnt from his provocative Clark Lectures), but there is no doubt, I think, that the living and the dead poet have much in common. Both are eccentric, wilful, passionate, boyish, grandiose, even histrionic. Where they differ—and this difference, I would say, is what makes Yeats a great poet, but Graves a 'very fine, minor one- . is that while Yeats raised himself above the per- sonal, the transitory, the immediate, and both created and entered a larger world, Mr. Graves has remained content to explore and re-explore the complexity of his own very delicate thoughts and emotions. Again, where Yeats was always prepared to recognise and admit 'the foul rag- and-bone-shop of the heart,' Mr. Graves has stayed an incurable romantic, but a romantic with a classical respect for form and decorum.

But it is, perhaps, ungrateful and churlish to criticise Mr. Graves for not doing in his verse what he has no wish to do; we should certainly be thankful for the stoicism, directness, and simplicity which have enabled him to go on writing, year after year, on a superbly high level of craftsmanship and with little regard for the vagaries of fashions and literary 'schools.' We should acknowledge, also, this poet's fine under- standing of the oddest states of mind and feeling; there is, after all, little about mental and physi- cal suffering which does not come within the scope of Mr. Graves's sympathy and com- passion. Any poet who can reach the difficult

lucidity of : '

He in a new confusion of his understanding: I in a new understanding of my confusion,

knows .a very great deal about the torments which touch us all, even the most apparently calm and unmoved of us.

If the perfection of Mr. Graves's verse is a comparatively minor perfection, this is only, I believe, because he himself has always quite deliberately shunned the large, the impersonal, the remote. To know one's own limitations as clearly as this is an unusual gift; that such a knowledge is itself a barrier to the greatest poetic achievements should not, I think, prevent us from recognising and being grateful for the mag- nificent contribution Mr. Graves has made to the already licit storehouse of English lyrical poetry.

ELIZABETH JENNINGS