48
PARTISAN REVIEW
trained historian, but with regard for the logic and honor of a mil–
itary order.
The Claudius novels with their command of Roman sources
have an air of permanence; they are among the few historical novels
written in English that are worth rereading. The forthright military
style that Graves has mastered shows itself at its best
in
his creation
of Claudius; its virtues are Roman virtues, and so presented as to
convince the reader that no time has been wasted (with documents
close at hand) in shaping the narrative into an attractive lie. Those
who look for moral values in Graves's interpretation of Claudius will
be disappointed; Graves has no concern with moral truth; his view
is not unlike that of a latter-day Suetonius who has concluded that
mankind is ruled by women.
In the United States Graves's reputation rests on his achieve–
ment in
I, Claudius,
and of the many who read the novels that fol–
lowed it, most of which were of erratic quality-and the least im–
pressive was
Wife to Mr. Milton-,
only a few associated Graves's
name with the writing of poetry. In 1948
The White Goddess, A
Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
appeared and as from a forest
of words, the resurrected figure of Robert Graves emerged. The book
has the fascination of all things difficult, the fascination of W. B.
Yeats's book,
A Vision;
it promised to reveal the ancient sources of
poetic being and truth-and to it Graves brought the result of some
forty years of independent reading: behind the writing of the book,
behind the paragraphs on every page one can almost see steel cabin–
ets from floor to ceiling filled with indexed cards, can almost see the
cards shuffled and reshuffled across a broad table, then laid face
upward and their notations read. As the book opens Graves seems to
lead his readers by the hand up to the gateway of his forest:
Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion. . . .
Prose has been my livelihood.. .. This book is about the rediscovery of
the lost rudiments, and about the active principles of poetic magic that
govern them.... My argument will be based on a detailed examination
of two extraordinary Welsh minstrel poems of the thirteenth century.
And within fifty pages, deep in the forest, one is face to face
with Graves's White Goddess, and introduced to her by a confederacy
of mercantile tribes who flourished at different periods in the second
