Graves Criticism
Focus on Robert Graves
Page first mounted 1 October 1999.Essays from Focus on Robert Graves and his Contemporaries, vol. II, 4. (Richard Schumaker) An electronic version of the final edition of this journal, now replaced by Gravesiana.
The markup of the essays is poor (and sometimes extremely poor), performed with an early version of Microsoft Internet Assistant: apostrophes are often rendered as the equals sign, and sometimes as commas. When the essays were first made available on the web in early 1996 they were stitched together into a single file more than 200k in size. This, combined with the slowness of the University of Maryland server on which the document lived, made it almost impossible to download. WebEdit seems to have been used to separate the essays into managable files, but not to correct the markup.Some of these essays were given (among many others) as papers at the St. John's College, Oxford, Robert Graves Centenary Conference in August 1995.
- Essay 1: Philosophical Speculations: Mock Beggar Hall, Welchman's Hose, and Poetic Unreason by Patrick Quinn
- Essay 2: (Im)proper Wife: Robert Graves´ Wife to Mr Milton by Lucia Boldrini
- Essay 3: Sex, Lies, and Nietzsche According to Robert Graves by Richard Schumaker
- Essay 4: Laura (Riding) Jackson: The "I" Thing by Anett Jessop
- Essay 7: Not So Hidden Agendas: Wilfred Owen and His Early Editors by Stephen Cloutier
- Essay 9: The Great War and Recent Writing by Bernard Bergonzi
The Robert Graves Archive
Correspondence with the Archive on Graves is available under the title, "Difficult Questions, Easy Answers".An essay by Marian Hodgkin, The physical and mental scars of World War One as portrayed in poems by W. Owen and R. Graves. [linked 14th June 1999]
The Robert Graves Society
As the BBC Webguide notes in its review of the Society's site, the house journal of the Society Gravesiana remains irritatingly unavailable on the web. However detailed indices to the contents are available.
- The Robert Graves Society Gravesiana Information and Index page.
- The Robert Graves Society Gravesiana Subscriptions page.
- Review by John Presley of Miranda Seymour's Graves' biography: "Life on the Edge"
General Items
- 1959 Review by Gore Vidal of Graves' translation of Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars, available from Rick Geib's site. There is a large graphic on this page which may make it slow to download.[April 1999]
- Some of Graves work has been received badly by the academic community. The reasons for this are often complex. The following review of Robert Graves work in the area of mythology and religion, and its reception by academia, "Robert Graves & his Gnosis" by Yuri Kuchinsky (Toronto), in two parts, casts some light on this reception. Robert Graves & his Gnosis Part 1, and Robert Graves & his Gnosis Part 2. [added 08 May 1999]