The Love Poetry of Robert Graves

Abstract

In this century, which 'is stingy with love poems or poems about love,' Robert Graves has emerged as the pre-eminent love poet. It was in large part his cantankerous independence, his refusal to be moved by literary movements, his defiance of easy classification within the modern terms of acceptance, that made it possible for him to leave us such a large body of first-rate love poems. He avoided, or, more accurately, worked his way through and beyond the disillusionments and cynicisms so common in the poets of the decades between the wars. The vogue of Bohemianism, which he and Alan Hodges in The Long Weekend so nicely characterized as 'a gay disorderliness of life, cheerful bad manners, and no fixed hours or sexual standards,' urged its poets into an emphasis on the failures, discouragements, and isolations of 'modern' desire. lf the Great War intensified the questioning of the virtue of courage and the aims of honour, the years that followed broadened the assault, bringing further into doubt the absoluteness and reasonableness of many more moral categories and distinctions, including love and lust. Graves was one of the few who stood against that spirit of the age, reinvesting his faith in creative possibility, in claims of fullness and fulfilment in human love, in the very capacity for that highest form of human sympathy and most complex form of self-sacrifice.