The Poetry of Robert Graves - Michael Kirkham torrent

Category: Literature
Language: EnglishKeywords: Poetry Robert Graves

Written by Michael Kirkham
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Variable

Grey haunted eyes, absent-mindedly glaring
From wide, uneven orbits; one brow drooping
Somewhat over the eye
Because of a missile fragment still inhering,
Skin-deep, as a foolish record of old-world fighting.

Crookedly broken nose — low tackling caused it;
Cheeks, furrowed; coarse grey hair, flying frenetic;
Forehead, wrinkled and high;
Jowls, prominent; ears, large; jaw, pugilistic;
Teeth, few; lips, full and ruddy; mouth, ascetic.

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.

An Anglo-German Irishman who was an English poet. Graves was a master craftsman in both prose and verse and wrote some of the best love poetry of the twentieth century. Terse and always lucid, his style is characterised by a plain, sinewy and forceful diction.

Graves was possessed of an encyclopedic if eccentric erudition and trusted his intuitions.This quality has been referred to as ‘his reasonable and courtly unreason, his classic tone as he celebrates the irrational.’ He liked to tweak academic noses and some of his theories were doubtless leg-pulls e.g that the Etruscans must have known about nuclear radiation on account of the hardness of clay in Etruria. Unlike most of us, his mind was open to the universe of metaphor.

Philological and other inexactitudes aside, there is more ”truth” in The White Goddess and The Greek Myths than in those reductionist accounts of antiquity that merely recount bare facts in a constricted if scholarly manner. Just as it is possible to read Johnson’s dictionary from beginning to end so Grave’s easy style makes The Greek Myths similarly as readable and full of interest. Perhaps Graves was the last genuine man of letters in a line that extended from Johnson to himself.

This is the BBC/BL CD supplemented by the Argo and Caedmon recordings plus a few odds and ends - mp3@160 seems to be about the highest attainable sound quality for these fifty or sixty year old tapes.

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