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muse the daughter of memory as well as of inspiration. The individual
talent is subordinated to tradition-but to tradition of a special kind.
Grave's classicism goes back to the strict oral discipline of Celt or
Greek: an esoteric craft, needing not only long apprenticeship but
also the right cultic attitude toward inspiration. Almost every poem in
this book is about the white goddess and addressed implicitly to her.
She is not named, of course; nor does she appear separate from the
women or sentiments she inspires; but she is, as it were, the open mystery
on which this poetry is based.
It is Graves' strength to consider poetry a matter of troth rather
than truth. He is committed solely to the art of the great poets and
the muse they served. It is as simple as that-there is no further impera–
tive, no direct concern with truth to self or to society. This is quite
remarkable, since art today is either an impossible sincerity as in the
confessional poems of Mr. Seidel, or a rhetorical calculation of some
nicety as when Mr. Dugan is too conscious of his audience. Yet Graves
does not succumb to an art for art's sake position. For his concept
of art is quite analogous to the scientist's view of science or the novice's
attitude toward religion. Granted that the
call
is there, these vocations
demand a long and devoted apprenticeship. It is the paradox of all
disciplines that one must master them before mastering experience
through them. Self-expression, therefore, takes a very secondary place.
By studying the "rich darkness" of his compeer poets, Graves achieves
something greater than a personal cypher, technique or strategy. He
achieves an absolute discretion, as in the following poem on innocence
and experience:
Violence threatens you no longer:
It was your innocent temerity
Caused us to tremble: veterans discharged
From the dirty wars of life.
Forgive us this presumption: we are abashed–
As when a child, straying on the cliff's edge,
Turns about to ask her white-faced brothers:
"Do you take me for a child?"
The increased simplicity of these poems, each of which is an icon,
gives rise to a single untoward reflection. Graves' relations with the
muse are strangely easy. True, he is the first poet, after many Romantic
anticipations, to talk so humanly about them; this human simpleness,
in fact, makes his poems mysterious, since every encounter with woman
or muse is quietly "beatristic." For the same reason, however, it is
