Graves biography

Malorca is the author of many poetic collections, books on the theory of versification, historical novels, works on mythology and theory of myth, memoir prose. The son of the famous Irish poet A. Graves, Robert Graves began to write poetry in early childhood. Graves received a traditional upbringing in charterhaus - a closed school for boys, immigrants from the upper classes.

Having barely graduated from school, Graves volunteered in the army in the year; He spent the years of World War I at the front, was seriously wounded, which undermined his health for life and fundamentally changed the attitude, condemning for many years of depression; An unsuccessful marriage aggravated the poet’s spiritual drama. In the city, after the war, the Graves Poet painfully sought out his despair, being in conflict with himself and the world around him; These struggles and suffering could not find expressions in a clear, harmonious St.

George verse. In addition to financial difficulties, Graves agreed to teach at the University of Cairo, but in the city at that time he created a number of historical novels. The most striking of them are “I, Claudius” I, Claudius, and “Divine Claudius” Claudius The God, chronicles of the time of the Roman Emperor Claudius from the Julis-Clawdis dynasty, which are presented on behalf of Claudius himself and trace the events of the reign of Augustus, Tiberia and Caligula.

Claudius, a cruel, but wise emperor, who strengthened the military dictatorship, imperial power, canceled the Senate, who put forward the “new people” to the political arena, attracted the writer as a type of ruler-dictator whose paradigm did not lose relevance for the new time. Among the prosaic works of Graves, a special place is occupied by the novel “Tsar Jesus” King Jesus, about the Son of God; Along with the attempts of many theologists, historians and fiction writers to “reconstruct” the events of that time and the very image of Christ, the romance of Graves was the fruit of the merger of the labor historian-philosopher with the high inspiration of the poet.

Graves's interest in the origins that feeds poetry led him to deep, fundamental, artistic studies of the origin of myths, cults and religions.

The largest work in this regard is the White Goddess The White Goddess, which he called the "historical grammar of the poetic myth." Here, Graves develops a concept according to which all beliefs of the distant past, which served as sources of religion of the New Age, Christianity, lies the myth of the worship of the goddess. For him, the muse of poetry is the goddess of life and death.

She gives inspiration and the subject of inspiration, but also asks with the poet, demanding from him in return for honesty, zeal and devotion. In the cycle of lectures in the sixties at the University of Oxford and united under the name “Art and Principles of Poetry”, Poetic Craft and Principle, Graves speaks of the ominous power of the mechanical principle in modern being. The state, that is, the “political mechanism based on the power of money and the achievements of technology, requires the complete submission of the individual a new technocratic ideal is to free peoples not only from the need to think independently, but also from the temptation to develop habits incompatible with the uniform course of a rationally arranged life.” According to Graves, his contemporaries are interested in many things, from spaceships to abstract art, but they, as never before, "far from humanity, from the magic of love and simple joy of life." Along with the works based on Greek and biblical legends, Graves wrote stories, from which he then carefully selected the best for demanding readers.

The stories are entertaining, witty, differ in the surprise of the denouement, subtle observation, an excellent understanding of modern customs and motives of actions and relationships. Individual ethics, distrust of any public events, ironic tolerance for someone else's point of view, even naive, are affirmed in many stories of Graves. The writer himself from all his work attached the greatest importance to the poetry.

As the author himself explained, his prose is intended for those who are powerless to understand poetry, and poetry is only for poets. Nobody needs it anymore. Continuing to write poetry almost until the end of his life, Graves was merciless to his creations and called the garbage basket to his best friend. He advocated the liberation of poetry from pragmatic common sense and formal logic, for choosing words with a long emotional history.

Most of all, the Graves is attracted by mental suffering, the inevitable consequences of the innate inconsistency of a person. Graves compares their poems, written against the dominant views and tastes for the only purpose of expressing the inner world of the poet with all the conceivable directness and sincerity with the “scraps of images” by Broken Images. A voluntary reference to Mallorca, isolation from the literary and political life, which Europe was seething, allowed the poet to completely plunge into creativity, to find, without looking back at the authorities and idols, his system of ethical and aesthetic values.He developed his own original poetic manner: his verse was saturated with complex, mysterious and fantastic images, lost his clarity of St.

George, but at the same time retained the clarity of form, ironicism and harmoniousness. Using traditional metric, he found a new one in the connection, a seemingly incompetent - romantic image and an openly grounded, sexual principle; purity and temptation; Listenies and adoption of the inevitability of death. Nevertheless, Graves is a poet rather a traditional English school than a modernist experimenter.

His lyrics, love and philosophical, entered the Golden Fund of Poetry of the XX century.