Robert Graves
Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, novelist, critic and classicist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works. Graves's poems—together with his translations and innovative analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths; his memoir of his early life, including his role in the First World War, Good-Bye to All That; and his speculative study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess—have never been out of print...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 July 1895
CountryIreland
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.
Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.
Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
War was return of earth to ugly earth, War was foundering of sublimities, Extinction of each happy art and faith By which the world had still kept head in air, Protesting logic or protesting love, Until the unendurable moment struck - The inward scre