A PARABLE FOR WRITERS
45
lives near Edinburgh-and from Robert Graves, who for years has
been writing his books from Deya, Majorca, Spain.
I shall not speculate on all the reasons why younger English
poets since World War II have failed to weather the general blight
of mediocrity; I can say that the war, while it was going on, was
like a shot in the arm to those who felt a lack of "poetic inspiration,"
but like the taking of a violent, quickly active drug, the effects wore
off too soon, leaving its victims or patients less fortunate than before;
the hour of trial by fire had passed: common heroism had the diffi–
cult, unspectacular task of facing cold, colorless, almost foodless
mornings; what was meant to be a neo-Romantic movement in
writing was a Phoenix that rose from and fell back into a frying
pan. It had failed to cleanse itself in fire and ashes. Diffusion in
writing verse prevailed; words seemed to do no more than follow one
another through rhymed or unrhymed stanzas-and in what Alex–
ander Pope two centuries ago had called a "universal Darkness"
where even Palinurus nodded at the helm, it is scarcely surprising
that the belated reappearance of a Robert Graves brings with it a
moment of relief.
II
Robert Graves, from the very beginnings of his career, has
never been a completely neglected or forgotten writer; yet his var–
ious writings in prose with their curious underbrush-books written
frankly for money, others because he wished to write them, and still
others that were journalistic in their intention, have obscured the
value of his writings at their best. At the center of his professional
career (which has produced his historical novels, his cross-grained
autobiographies, his excursions into anthropology, his books on how
to write and how not to write ) his poems exist; to get at them at all,
to know the quality of Graves's intelligence, one had best begin with
the peculiarities of a Protestant, Anglo-Irish tradition that he in–
herited.
Graves shares with Elizabeth Bowen, and to some degree, W. B.
Yeats, the advantages as well as the dangers of that tradition. The
advantages include a well-stocked library as part of family household
furniture with its survivals of neo-classical culture and diction. Among
