Robert graves poems analysis

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Robert Graves (1895-1985) is now probably best-remembered for two prose works: his 1929 memoir Goodbye to All That, about his experience fighting in the First World War, and his 1934 novel I, Claudius, set in ancient Rome.

But Graves was also a highly influential poet – and theorist of poetry – whose work in this field influenced a raft of poets, including Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, both of whom thought highly of Graves’s ‘grammar of poetic myth, The White Goddess.

What, then, of Graves’s own poetry?

Although he was their contemporary, Robert Graves worked apart from the modernists, and in form and subject matter he was, on the whole, more traditional. But his poetry has an intensity of thought and feeling and displays a mastery of form that mean he is well worth reading.

Robert graves the white goddess

In this post, we select and introduce ten of Graves’s best poems.

1. ‘Two Fusiliers’.

Graves’s first collection of poems, Fairies and Fusiliers, appe