Robert Graves

Robert Graves was born on July 24, 1895, in Wimbledon and was the tenth child of Alfred Perceval Graves, a minor Irish poet and Gaelic scholar, and Amalie von Ranke, who was closely related to Leopold von Ranke, one of the founder fathers of modern historical studies. Graves was greatly influenced by his mother's puritanical beliefs and his father's love of Celtic poetry and myth. As a young man, he was more interested in mountain climbing and boxing than studying, but his love for poetry sustained him throughout his adolescence.

Graves received a scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford in 1913. However, his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, and he enlisted as a junior officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Graves was injured in the Battle of Loos in 1916 and while recovering, he published his first collection of poetry, "Over Brazier." By 1917, he had written a two-volume fiction autobiography of a Roman emperor, which was broadcasted by BBC. Graves is well known for his famous series, "Claudius," which has been televised widely and increased his popularity.

Graves was educated at King's College School, Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G.H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen. At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, "Over the Brazier," in 1916. Graves developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.

One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it. Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".

Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).

In 1927, he published "Lawrence and the Arabs," a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. "Good-bye to All That" (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934, he published his most commercially successful work, "I, Claudius." Using classical sources, he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in "Claudius the God" (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, "Count Belisarius" (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.

During the early 1970s, Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975, he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975, he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart failure. Graves was an English poet, translator, and novelist, one of the leading English men of letters in the twentieth century. He fought in World War I and won international acclaim in 1929 with the publication of his memoir of the First World War, "Good-bye to All That." After the war, he was granted a classical scholarship at Oxford and subsequently went to Egypt as the first professor of English at the University of Cairo. He is most noted for his series of novels about the Roman emperor Claudius and his works on mythology, such as "The White Goddess."