1. Critical reception of Robert Graves

A very good description of Graves as a poet was provided by the scholar John Carey who wrote in his obituary: "He had a mind like an alchemist's laboratory: everything that got into it came out new, weird and gleaming." (Contemporary Literary Criticism) He had the reputation of both literary genius and gloomy quack doctor. You either loved his work, or you hated it. This tendency to extreme positioning was invited not in the least by Graves himself, whose professed views had far-stretching consequences. If he was right and the rest of the world was wrong, he and only a handful of others were the only true poets in English literature.

Most critics agree that Graves was a brilliant craftsman. His status as a major poet, however, is not so generally accepted. The work of respected poets such as W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot would be more memorable than the highly idiosyncratic poetry of Robert Graves. But there are other voices who do call him a major author just because he stood apart from existing trends. In the beginning of the century, this tendency to the creation of personal belief systems even seems to have been 'in fashion'. W.H. Auden labelled him England's "greatest living poet". (Contemporary Literary Criticism) So the least you can say is that there was no real unanimity among critics. Nevertheless, I will still try to give a complete chronological overview of the critical reception of Robert Graves throughout his poetic career and after his death.
In 1963, A.G. Parise noted that Graves had still received very little critical attention. He goes on to give a number of possible reasons for this lack of interest. First of all, he states that Robert Graves, in the 1920's, had been a Romantic in an age of impersonal poetry. Secondly, in an age of wild experimentation in verse he had been fairly traditional in this respect. During the war he had briefly been associated with Georgianism but afterwards he was to be found in a circle of other at that time little known poets such as Laura Riding, Robert Frost and John Crowe Ransom. Parise explains that throughout the 1930's, Graves remained such a little known poet mainly because he lived outside of England. And he didn't only live outside of England geographically but also, and maybe more importantly, ideologically. He rejected public values, refused any engagement and didn't stray for a second from his personal beliefs. It is only after the Second World War that there began to come some scholarly interest in Robert Graves. This was due to the fact that he was now reaching a wider audience with his historical novels. Graves also forced himself upon the literary scene by lecturing, by writing a great mass of lively prose for magazines and by publishing his poetic testament, The White Goddess. At the time when Parise made these observations, Graves was already acknowledged - he was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford - but there were still very few good critical articles on him available.

Parise himself was one of the first to write a lengthy study about Graves rising above the level of journalism. In his introduction, he looks back for a moment at the critical reception that was slowly starting to pick up in the second half of the 20th century. The best article on Graves, according to him, was Martin Seymour-Smith's Robert Graves, published in 1958 as number 78 in the series Writers and their Work. Seymour-Smith saw his poetry as "a single-minded pursuit of religious values and their relations with physical, moral and social values." (Parise 4) The three milestones in this quest he takes to be three of Graves' prose works: the autobiographical Good-bye to All That, the psychoanalytical The Meaning of Dreams and finally the generalization of this historical and psychological material in The White Goddess. Among the recurrent motifs in Graves' poetry, according to Seymour-Smith, were a profound distrust of the flesh and impossible aspirations for the spiritual life. He took these to be a result of the poet's life-long prudery. Graves' poetic quest, then, was finding "the way of salvation through love and its accepted losses, against the background of a public world whose confusions are a perpetual threat". (Seymour-Smith 20) It is not surprising, therefore, that Seymour-Smith compared him with Kierkegaard and Camus. Although Graves' world views as described above clearly tended towards existentialism, Parise is a little bit more reserved in taking over this comparison. He points out that Graves can be called an existentialist only "insofar as he rejected values not in his own experience, insisted on the individual's essential isolation, and eventually denied the validity of philosophical statements that were not in his poetic mode". (Parise 5) Seymour-Smith's article, then, is a useful one only for readers already convinced of Graves' existentialist allegiances.
The second article that Parise discusses in his introduction is by J.M. Cohen. Like Seymour-Smith, he also compared Graves' poetic development to a spiritual quest. He saw this quest not as a movement down a straight line, but rather as a chaotic search for islands of truth. As Cohen puts it,

Graves work ... reveals a number of partial explorations, also various changes of direction, all in the course of this single journey, which has led from the Romantic looseness of his war poems of 1914-1918 to the close organization and the deeply pondered and reasoned emotion of his most recent love poems. (Parise 5)

The chaotic nature of Graves' search for answers led Cohen to distrust any unifying explanation that could be given for his poems. He even insisted in this distrust when the unifying force seemingly holding the poems together was Graves' own A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth: The White Goddess. Cohen was not very positive about this source book. Whereas Seymour-Smith considered it to be the final stage in a quest for unity, Cohen discards it as a poor attempt to create a unifying poetic world view. And he doesn't stand alone in his negative criticism of The White Goddess and Graves as a poet, as will become obvious when I discuss the articles written about him from 1963 onwards.

Douglas Day, still in that same year, recognized Graves as "a poet of great skill, discipline, and strength of character" (Day 1963, 216), but also as a man who possesses "a determined and conscious streak of eccentricity." (Day 1963, 216) Like Seymour-Smith, Day focuses on the linear progression in Graves' work. He presents the poet's oeuvre as a very unstable one. Graves kept revising his works in his quest for perfection, making each poem only a representation of theories he had at the specific time of writing. Earlier poems could thus resurface in a later collection with a totally different twist given to them. This 'floating' oeuvre should not be considered a bad thing necessarily. As Day observed, "such thorough and ceaseless pruning has been almost invariably beneficial to the poems subjected to it". (Day 1963, xiii)

Seymour-Smith had already divided Graves' career in three major periods. Day now envisions a further division into four chapters. The first one, covering the years from 1916 to 1923, tells the tale of a Georgian poet shell-shocked by his experience of the First World War. Emotional intensity was the keyword of the times. By 1923, though, Graves turned the page and distanced himself from any emotional involvement. Day characterizes the poetry of this period as "giving way too often to a somewhat flippant cynicism and displaying a frivolous lack of purpose which indicates that Graves is at this time trying to deal with matters for which he has little real sympathy". (Day 1963, xvi) He is searching for something to hold on to at a time when poetry itself seems to be among the victims lying slain on the European battlefields.

In Viking lore, dead warriors were carried off to salvation by female spirits called valkyries. Graves' valkyrie, then, was called Laura Riding, an American poetess whom he became acquainted with in 1926. She stepped in to give direction to Graves' languid wanderings. "The influence of Laura Riding is quite possibly the most important single element in his poetic career: she persuaded him to curb his digressiveness and his rambling philosophizing, and to concentrate instead on tense, ironic poems written on personal themes." (Day 1963, xvi) Some of his best work originated from that third period under the guidance of this intellectual mistress.
But "he still lacked the one quality that all poets must possess if they are to be more than competent craftsmen: a vision of the universe which informs and unifies all their work, a way of going beyond themselves into something larger, more universally meaningful, in short, a religious attitude." (Day 1963, xvii) With Graves, religion was always as far removed from Christianity as possible. He had no faith whatsoever in the traditional systems he believed to be bankrupt after the First World War. Instead he went digging in pre-Christian times to find better ones.

To go back to Viking mythology, the supreme goddess and leader of the valkyries was Freya, the blond, blue-eyed and beautiful. Graves believed her to be one of the manifestations of the White Goddess, the supreme deity once worshipped in the whole of pre-Christian Western Europe. He believed that true poetry could only be poetry written in the service of this Muse and Mother Goddess. As the poet attests in 'To Juan at the Winter Solstice',

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling. (Abrams, 2218)

Douglas Day is still very positive about The White Goddess. He treats it as the successful closing chapter of the book of Graves' career. Others, however, were far less positive. Monroe K. Spears in his 1965 article 'The Latest Graves: Poet and Private Eye' already sheds an entirely different light on the subject.

Spears first observes that Graves rejects Victorianism and Modernism in favour of his own poetic system. This is based on the worship of the Muse, the feminine principle, as opposed to Apollo, the masculine principle. But Graves' dogmatic approach can be called Apollonian as well. Spears thus tries to expose Graves as a hypocrite. He then goes on to lay bare the three arguments Graves claims to have against Modernism.
The first one, according to Spears, is nothing more than xenophobic prejudice. Modernist poetry would be un-English, based on continental models and psychological theory. I have to be quick to remark that this is the late Graves we're talking about. In his early years, the poet was himself a psychoanalyst of some sort. The case Spears tries to make of Graves being a hypocrite is thus certainly not entirely built on quicksand.
The second argument is closely linked with the first one. Modernist poetry would be nothing more than a confusion of the arts and would make no sense. Spears cites Graves from Food for Centaurs: "All I know is that a Modernism based on a confessedly impossible attempt at adapting English poetic practice to the aesthetic principles of French painting makes no sense." (Spears 661)
Finally, Modernist poetry would be in essence critical instead of creative. This kind of poetry is composed in the forepart of the mind and is, ultimately, Apollonian in its approach. It feeds on the rational mind recycling classical examples and adapting them to contemporary fashion. Graves' Muse poetry, then, is situated on the other end of the scales. It is composed in the back of the mind, "an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time powerfully disciplined... The effect on readers of Muse poetry ... is what the French call a frisson, and the Scots call a gruemeaning, the shudder provoked by fearful or supernatural experiences." (Spears 662) Spears observes that this is the same dichotomy once made by Matthew Arnold. In the twentieth century Arnold's theory had come under fire from poets like T.S. Eliot. Graves, however, couldn't care less about this, since he had little respect for a typically Modernist poet like Eliot. His affinity with Arnold is also understandable, because Arnold felt as much at home in the Victorian world as Graves did in the modern one. But if Graves didn't belong in the modern world, where did he belong to? Spears, in any case, has an easy answer ready. He considers Graves' theory of poetry as a "conventional late Romantic notion of poetry as emotional and magic, remarkable only in its crude simplicity and vulnerability." (Spears 662)

On the subject of Graves' myth of the White Goddess, Spears has only negative criticism. As a criterion for the judgement of poetry - as Graves envisioned it - he finds it too preposterous to discuss seriously. He accuses Graves of hanging on to old-fashioned heresies, which would have been popular in the 19th century but were long since dismissed as fairy tale material. Spears therefore considers the scholarly value of The White Goddess to be zero. It would only be useful when studying Graves' own poetry.
Historians in general are usually not very fond of Mr. Graves. Here's someone with no real education in their field of work and with no working knowledge of the languages he claims to study. Graves "expects to find a solution that no one has discovered before both in his historical novels and in his scholarly works by deciphering and interpreting the concealed clues. Thus, as a kind of historical Sherlock Holmes, he finds the true and simple solution which previous investigators have been too stupid to see." (Spears 665) This is of course quite pretentious and it is bound to provoke fierce reactions from professional scholars. In order to see things more clearly, though, we have to make a distinction between Robert Graves, the historian and Robert Graves, the poet. Almost all of the negative reviews are directed towards the first one of these two. Most literary critics agree, however, that Graves was a talented poet. The myth of the White Goddess they consider to be a brilliant fictional construction and nothing more.

In his 1969 book The Poetry of Robert Graves, Michael Kirkham argues against those critics reducing The White Goddess to an escapist fantasy. He sets out to prove that it is in fact firmly rooted in the soil of the 20th century. Although Graves seemed to evade the problems of the world he lived in, he was no less engaged with it. He responded to reality by - very consciously - isolating himself from it. Graves was not ignorant of, but very aware of the wasteland Eliot described. After the experience of the First World War, he refused to be dragged down into the poetic abyss of Modernism. Graves observed that he was born into an age that was "intellectually and morally in perfect confusion." (Kirkham 270) But he considered it "the poet's task, or fate, to be exposed to, but not to be destroyed by such confusion." (Kirkham 270) A poet should bring order into a chaotic universe.

By the time Kirkham made these observations, Graves had already taken his quest for order to the next level. He now worshipped the Black Goddess of Wisdom, who could offer him "knowledge of a final certitude in love" (Kirkham 49). According to Kirkham, this new poetic wisdom was that of "Sufism, a Wisdom-cult of uncertain origin which is known to have attracted adherents from all religions, especially from among poets (much of its literature is in poetic form), since the time of Mohammed." (Kirkham 8)
Kirkham thus completes Day's survey of Graves' career with a fourth and final chapter. I say fourth - and not fifth - because Kirkham no longer makes the distinction between the Romantic emotional and the cynical period. He treats them as one period: Graves' war poems. The importance of this early period for the development of the poet Robert Graves can not be underestimated. In Kirkham's words:

The post-war neurasthenia which for a time psychologically crippled Graves was responsible for deflecting him, after a brief, unsuccessful spell as a war poet, from public to personal themes: he turned his attention to the problems of realizing poetically the violent emotional disturbances that afflicted him. At the same time his neurasthenia was partly responsible for the urgency with which he also turned, at first as an escape, to romantic love as a theme. The neurosis was an accident of circumstance but one that has had a long-standing effect on Graves' work. It not only accounts for the desperate quality of his early love poetry, but it has made a permanent impression on his personality and therefore on the nature of his love poetry ever since. (Kirkham 8)

Graves' emotional development could at no point be depicted as a straight line, but rather as a wave-like motion between ecstasy and anguish. This change from one extreme into the other was, according to Kirkham, one of the poet's main characteristics. Graves sought for a fixed point to neutralize this imbalance. His search, then, seemed to be over after the publication of The White Goddess for it formed the perfect equilibrium between Romantic impossibility and realistic awareness. It offered him spiritual values he could base his way of life on. "The White Goddess Myth, of course, objectifies a personal drama, but one that takes place within a wider context, contemporary and timeless." (Kirkham 273)
When asked to comment on his prose works, Graves himself was always surprisingly modest. He insisted that they were nothing more than pot-boilers and that his serious work was in poetry. This is of course far too modest an opinion, Peter Quennell rightfully observed in 1971. He felt certain every critic would agree with him on this. How each of those critics would then judge the actual content of the novels was a different matter altogether. The fact remained that they were there and they couldn't be easily ignored.

Although Quennell didn't have quite as negative views as Spears, he did agree with him as far as Graves' working method was concerned. Graves would first look for something to believe in and only then would he collect the evidence that would fit this picture. Of course, this is not the way to build up scholarly credibility. Again, we get the remark that The White Goddess should only be seen in its narrow poetic context.
But once the cloak of science is removed from Graves' face, there's no stopping him rising like a star on the poetic firmament. As Quennell observed in 1971, "Robert Graves now stands high above the great majority of modern English poets. [H]e owes his position not only to his inherited gifts but to the remarkable persistence and diligence with which he has exploited them." (Quennell 183) Instead of the chaotic search perceived by Cohen and Kirkham, Quennell sees in Graves' career a steady onward course. To him, Graves' "poetic Line of Destiny is astonishingly straight and clear." (Quennell 186)

Patrick Grant in his 1975 article 'The Dark Side of the Moon: Robert Graves as Mythographer' writes that Graves perceives the problems with clarity, however wrongheaded he might seem to serious scholars. He does this in response to an earlier review of Graves' The Greek Myths by H.J. Rose. This critic objected to the fact that "Graves includes sentimentalities of his own devising, legitimate enough in a work of the imagination, but quite out of place in a handbook of mythology, where a story should be told as the authorities tell it, or epitomized from their account." (Grant 145) It all boils down to the same old conflict: Graves the poet versus Graves the historian.
Grant defends his case by saying that Graves shouldn't be analyzed scientifically in the first place. "Though he will adapt the modern skills and sciences, Graves does not aim to reproduce their results: to criticize him for not doing so is to fall into a trap, as he scornfully expects we will." (Grant 146) A more simple explanation, to my mind, would then be that Graves doesn't act like a serious scholar because he is first and foremost a poet. Grant, however, goes on to defend his status as a historian. He sees a striking resemblance between Graves and "the mythographers of the mainstream of Western tradition prior to the Puritan revolution which inaugurated the modern era of technology and scientific nominalism". (Grant 162) This is already an entirely different explanation from that of Michael Kirkham who insisted that Graves was still firmly rooted in the experience of the 20th century. Grant supports his argument by pointing out seven similarities between Graves and his congenial predecessors. Firstly, they both consider mythology to be the cradle of poetic inspiration. Secondly, they agree that "myth, like true poetry, contains the profoundest cultural secrets". (Grant 154) Graves lamented the fact that, in the age he was living in, there were no more secrets lying at the heart of poetry. Thirdly, they were convinced that these secrets were best expressed by "inspiration and formulation in stirring metres". (Grant 154) The close link between poetry and myth is thus stressed for the second time. A fourth common conviction would be that the poet's task is priest-like. Graves strongly believed that both were formerly functions of the same person. For this poet-priest, "great learning and love of nature are indispensable tools." (Grant 154) He should also be aware of the magic origins of word meanings. These were considered to be "prior to reductive conceptualization that distinguishes historical fact from imaginative fancy." (Grant 154) Finally, "such conventions find expression in an almost perversely disorganized and digressive style." (Grant 154) What Grant concludes from all this is that Graves re-appears as an old European writer rather than as a modern one.
This comparison doesn't go all the way, though. There's one major point of difference between Graves and the old European writers. Graves turned to the Universal Mother as his Muse and idol instead of turning to God the Father. This can again be reduced to the distinction between feeling and rationality that Spears had already made. Grant doesn't share Spears' negative views on The White Goddess though. He attributes the book's bad reception to the fact that it has no footnotes or bibliography. This implies that he has, at least, considered it as a scholarly text instead of a poet's work of fiction.

Katherine Snipes is a little bit more reserved in placing Graves on either end of the scale. She pictures Graves dwelling in the no-man's-land between rationalism and Romanticism. She comes to this conclusion making use of new anthropological insights. At the time of writing, 1979, Lévi-Strauss had developed a structural analysis that supposedly explained the mechanics behind myth-making. Myths would be stories created to mediate between opposite categories. In the specific case of Lévi-Strauss' own research, these were easily identifiable: stories that involved "the origin of fire and the origin of antifire (wind and rain), incestuous kinship relations and murderous kinship relations, raw food (perceived as natural) and cooked food (perceived as cultural)". (Snipes 189) With this information a computer should be able to get to the bottom of the web of meaning peculiar to each particular society. In the case of a single poet like Robert Graves, however, things aren't so black-and-white. Snipes has to admit that anthropologists are still a long way from explaining the interchange of meaning in the mind of one individual. Graves' eccentric personality, in any case, also kept swinging violently to and fro between opposite positions. He started out as a conventional Christian but after the Great War he soon turned his back on this faith. He then considered Christianity to be a dead cell devoid of any true meaning and went on to be a liberal atheist. Graves in his early days was also some kind of a psychoanalyst, the very same kind he would look down on later on in his career. Snipes therefore utters the hope that future researchers will be able to analyze him making use of Lévi-Strauss' method.

On the subject of Graves' The White Goddess, Snipes has a fairly controversial opinion. She doesn't share the presupposition of most scholars that "the White Goddess is merely a projection of Graves' imagination." (Snipes 193) On the contrary, she claims that "modern archaeological scholarship supports his claims for the widespread goddess cults of Neolithic times" and that "the evidence for the pre-eminence of women in the social-religious life of that time, while not conclusive, is certainly impressive." (Snipes 193) In itself, this is already an interesting point, since Katherine Snipes is the first female critic to evaluate The White Goddess. I can't help but wondering if this might have influenced her positive assessment. Or are the times at the beginning of the eighties simply starting to open up for Graves' way of thinking? According to Snipes, "much of the animosity directed toward Graves is not really attributable to his scholarship, good or bad, but to his value judgements. Unlike the nineteenth century Bachofen, who claimed that civilization advanced from matriarchy to patriarchy, Graves presents the change as unmitigated disaster, from which spring all the evils of capitalism, technology, and war. He has also had the temerity to apply comparative methods to Christian mythology, still widely tabooed for some kinds of intellectual inquiry. Thus, for some hypersensitives, he is a trespasser on private intellectual domains, a traitor to his own sex, and a pernicious misleader of youth." (Snipes 195) Obviously, Snipes doesn't consider herself to be one of those hypersensitives. She believes that Graves as a historian would have to be rediscovered in a more positive light. It would be interesting to see if the dawning of the eighties indeed heralded the critical reception Snipes envisioned.

One year later, in 1980, Patrick J. Keane produces his A Wild Civility: Interactions in the Poetry and Thought of Robert Graves. If Snipes' ideas concerning Graves' scholarship had gained a foothold among fellow-critics, we should be able to see them resurface in this work. The emergence of feminism as a dominant factor in the early eighties could be decisive in that matter. Keane, however, remains very cautious when touching upon the subject. He does mention that "Graves is convinced his studies have shown that the imagery of the authentic Romantics was drawn, either consciously or unconsciously, from the cult of the Goddess and that the magic their poems exert largely depends on an intimacy with her mysteries." (Keane 90) But his use of the phrase 'Graves is convinced' seems to imply that he himself isn't too sure. But I don't think he's too concerned with the question of how much historical truth there is in Graves' writings. He certainly treats him as a skilled 20th century poet and defends him against critics like Monroe K. Spears who had relegated him to the realm of childish fairy tales. Keane - like Michael Kirkham before him - stresses Graves' strong bond with reality:

What for Graves is a central theme will seem to others merely eccentric; what to him is the persistent survival of a timeless motif is for others an atavistic aberration. And yet, despite his obsession with the ancient world, with love magic and poetic magic, with dragons and dreams and rites of blood, with ancient Welsh prosody, Sufi mysticism and Celtic romance, Graves is a man of the modern world. He fought in that war which has itself come to seem a zigzag trench cutting through this century, dividing the old from the modern consciousness. ... He may find little to admire in the modern world, but he is certainly aware of what it is he spits from his mouth. (Keane 90)

Keane takes Graves seriously as a man of his time. But that doesn't mean he also thinks of him as a major poet. The criteria for being a major poet he considers to be the production of a vast amount of work, the invention of a central theme and the greater quality of the poetry itself. The quantitative aspect seems to be no problem, for Graves has composed an oeuvre of respectable size over the years. The requirement of having a unifying theme, obviously, has also been met with the myth of the White Goddess. That leaves us with only the third requirement: the poetry has to be major poetry. And that is, according to Keane at least, where the shoe pinches. Graves writes minor poetry and can thus not be called a major poet. At first, this sounds like a pretty subjective judgement: Robert Graves is no major poet because he doesn't write major poetry. But it is given authority by Graves himself when he insists that minor poetry is the real stuff: "Nothing is better than the truly good, not even the truly great.... Good poets are exceedingly rare; 'great poets' are all too common." (quoted from Graves in Keane 95) Keane interprets this as a clever response from Graves, who knows his own limitations all too well. He never attempts to reach for the clouds the way literary predecessors like Blake, Coleridge and Keats had tried to do before him. The ambitious projects of these Great Romantics, Keane observes, actually never earned them their status as major English poets. Ironically, it were the smaller poems that were responsible for their introduction into the canon.

But even if those precursor-poems for Graves, The Mental Traveller, The Ancient Mariner, and the most condensed of these epical ballads, La Belle Dame sans Merci, were to be considered minor, the fact remains that the ambition of Blake, Coleridge and Keats ... was to create major poetry, specifically to out-Milton Milton. In contrast to these titanic overreachers and failed questers, Graves is teleological. (Keane 96)

Furthermore, on the subject of Graves' place in the literary pantheon, Keane has the following to say:

If pride, determination, length of dedicated service, and courage in the field were the only criteria, Robert Graves would be second to no poet of this century, not even to Yeats. But they are not the only criteria; and Graves, for all his indisputable achievement and valiant refusal to give in to dead forces, remains a poet whose story ends honourably rather than gloriously. (Keane 99)

So would it be fair to conclude that Keane saw Graves as a second-rate poet? No it wouldn't, because Keane doesn't stop there. At the end of his argument, he puts his earlier statements into perspective. He recognizes that Graves was a man who stood firmly behind the principles he believed in and, although he was a strange bird, not quite at home in the Modernist sky, he had that special talent which enabled him to mould mystery into meaning. Therefore he deserves our respect and the status of a good poet, maybe no more than that but certainly no less.

The years surrounding Graves' death in 1985 were cloaked in a death-like silence. It seemed as if critical interest in the man had died with him. In 1991 then, Daniel Hoffman writes a short piece on Graves in the Reference Guide to English Literature. He focuses mainly on Graves' chameleonic character as a poet. And indeed, his poetic heritage ranges over several centuries. In his search for ecstasy and formal perfection he combined both Romantic and Classicist ideas. And it is just this frantic search that Hoffman characterizes as typical for the modern condition, where thought and sensibility can no longer be placed alongside each other. Graves, then, responded to the problems of the 20th century by bringing together the ideals of the past.
Unlike the Romantics, though, Graves would not be remembered for his 'minor poetry'. It was his major prose works that caught the public's eye. Alan Murphy tries to figure out the reasons why. In doing so he seems to humour Katherine Snipes by presenting Graves as "an accomplished and invariably contentious historian". (Murphy) For his historical novels, Graves always displayed such an impressive body of evidence that, "no matter how unlikely the incidents related, they always [seemed] plausible". (Murphy) Graves' biggest achievement, according to Murphy, was "the supreme illusion of bringing the dead to life." (Murphy) He was an undisputed master of envisioning and recreating the past. But Murphy then also acknowledges the fact that this is only an illusion. If historians were judged merely by the effect they have on their readers, Robert Graves would without a doubt be a splendid historian, but of course there's more to it than that. Scholarly research requires certainties, not probabilities. And I'm sure Graves' working method will have evoked more than a few mocking smiles from serious scholars. His 'analeptic method' Murphy described as "the intuitive recovery of forgotten events by a deliberate suspension of time". (Murphy) Graves would thereby attempt to reach a trance-like state in order to let his mind's eye travel back to ancient times. Whether or not Graves really believed he was going back into the past, Murphy certainly didn't believe it. He saw Graves as a successful historian, not for his effective methods, not for his brilliant solutions, but solely for the entrancing effect he had on the readers of his novels.
In this respect, of course, he shouldn't call Graves a historian at all, but rather a poet. This point was, once again, made by Longenbach in his 1995 article 'White Goddess, Selfish Poet' for Nation magazine, where he reviewed Miranda Seymour's book Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. He backs up Seymour's claim that Graves should be considered 'first and foremost as a poet', despite the impressive body of prose. On other matters, however, writer and reviewer seem to be in disagreement. There's for example the question just how big a poet Graves really is. Seymour opens her book with the following statement: "In twentieth-century poetry, Robert Graves is to love what Philip Larkin is to mortality." (Longenbach 634) Longenbach feels this is giving Graves far too much credit. "The amorphous categories to which Seymour gestures - love, mortality - suggest that only by casting the critical net this widely can Graves be made to look like a writer who merits the attention her biography accords him." (Longenbach 634) In the wake of his myth of the White Goddess, Graves was producing poems almost machine-like. Longenbach is therefore doubtful if they were also qualitatively good poems. In the midst of the sand of Graves' poetic oeuvre, he can put his finger on only a few rare pieces of gold, such as 'The Pier-Glass' for example.

Another review of a book related to Graves was written by David Kirby for the Library Journal in 1996. He put Richard Perceval Graves' Robert Graves and the White Goddess under the magnifying glass. 'Under the guillotine' is actually closer to the truth, though. Kirby had not a single positive word to say:

'Although I don't propose raking up the past,' wrote poet and novelist Graves, who died in 1985, if it is raked up, I want the whole story told.' The question is, why? Graves left behind a vast body of work (I, Claudius; The White Goddess) as well as a domestic history rife with affairs, drunkenness, and the odd stabbing, all of which is reported in impressive detail in the biographical trilogy of which this is the third and final volume. Perhaps Graves wanted others to know how attractive he was to women, notably the four youthful 'muses' of his later years. Or he may have wanted to atone in some fashion, because he had a mammoth self-punishing streak. ... Surely there is no more to be said about the life of this messy, self-adoring, supremely talented man, a professional writer par excellence yet a thoroughly amateur human being. (Kirby 58)

The fact that Kirby's attack is directed towards the man and not the poet is certainly not a compliment for the poet either. He is actually implying that Graves' talents are wasted on such a poor excuse of a human being.

A review of the same biography by R.P. Graves of his uncle was written by John Woodrow Presley. He starts out with confirming the quality of this work when compared to earlier biographies. Seymour-Smith's first attempt to write down the facts of Robert's life, for example, is here relegated to the work of a disciple, the implication being that it failed to be objective. And objectivity is certainly a 'conditio sine qua non' when writing about the last third of Graves' life, the period of The White Goddess. Graves' biggest achievement during this time was, according to Presley, his introduction of the principle of 'iconotropy'. This refers to the technique of unveiling historical images corrupted by patriarchal society as their matriarchal originals. The biggest disappointment Presley considers to be Graves' The Nazarene Gospel Restored. The amount of time and energy the writer put into the research for this project didn't translate into the public effect he had hoped for. But then again, it was a pretty ambitious undertaking. Graves dared to question the actual text of the bible, using iconotropy to re-interpret the historical events.
As could be expected, he didn't bring about a major shift in Western thinking. But maybe he did get the ball rolling. The nineties saw the publication of such controversial studies as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and Bloodline of the Holy Grail. Here the historical figure of Jesus is subjected to a thorough investigation. The influence of Graves' earlier research is undeniable. I'm well aware, though, that the scholarly value of these particular works is as much a matter of discussion as that of the writings of Graves himself.

Joseph Wiesenfarth, for one, considers Graves' Goddess theories as nothing more than a reflection of the poet's own relationships with women. The most important one, then, was Graves' relationship with his mother, Amelia von Ranke Graves. The young Robert supposedly became a poet to rival with his father - who was also a poet - ultimately and solely for the love of his mother. This Oedipus complex would thus lie at the basis of Graves' quest for 'knowledge of a final certitude in love'. Wiesenfarth scolds Seymour-Smith for not having seen, or having refused to see, this simple fact.
He then goes on to press home his argument by drawing our attention to the similarity between Amy's character and Graves' mythological construct. She was a woman of such rigorous discipline that "good never seemed to be good enough" (Wiesenfarth 95) for her. When Robert came to her for comfort when he couldn't bear staying at boarding school any more, his parents took the issue up with the housemaster, obviously making the situation even worse. The young man felt betrayed, and this proved to be a devastating psychological blow. As a defence mechanism, Graves started to feign madness.
A few years later, he didn't have to fake it anymore, though. The madness of the First World War left him shell-shocked and disillusioned. He wanted to escape the wicked world, and thought he had done so by moving to Mallorca. But his great escape turned out to be no matter of geography. He ran from the coldness of a mother's heart he had been unable to melt to the inspired heat of the fanatically feminist Laura Riding. This turned out to be another disappointment though. She was every bit as much a dominant and demanding personality as Amy had been. Graves found himself once again lovelorn and abandoned. Eventually he did find a loving wife in Beryl Hodge, but she was unable to silence the storm that had already been unleashed in Graves' heart.
These biographical facts certainly help to explain how the myth of the White Goddess came into being. The face of the loving and cruel Mother then seems no abstraction anymore, but that of Amelia von Ranke Graves and later also that of Laura Riding. I'm pretty certain that Graves would have responded to this interpretation by saying that we're confusing cause and effect. Because he was an acolyte of the White Goddess, he had to find her incarnation in earthly form, and not the other way around. Whatever the case, Graves' fascination for the Great Mother of ancient times certainly didn't seem to have fallen from the sky.

If anything should be clear after reading this chronological overview, it is that there stíll exists no real unanimity among critics. Their evaluations of Robert Graves range from an old European mythographer to a scholar and a historian, from a Romantic poet to a Modern one. Obviously all these aspects can be examined, but for this study I'm going to limit myself to Graves' claims - or those of his critics, in any case - to Romantic poethood. In order to do so, we first have to deal with the question of just what are the features of a Romantic poet.