Acquisitions (78): Robert Graves

Robert Graves: The Golden Fleece (1944)

•

Robert Graves (1895-1985)


Robert Graves: The Golden Fleece (1944)
[Hospice Bookshop, Birkenhead - 1/11/2022]:

Graves, Robert. The Golden Fleece. Overseas Edition. London: Cassell & Co., Ltd., 1944.

Robert Graves: Hercules My Shipmate (1945)


The Millennium Graves Programme

The other day I picked up a cheap first edition of one of Robert Graves's more eccentric novels, The Golden Fleece, in a local Hospice Shop. NB: It was also published in the US under the curious title Hercules My Shipmate, so don't be misled into thinking that these are two different novels. The same is true of Seven Days in New Crete (1949), published in America as Watch the North Wind Rise, and (rather more justifiably) Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth (1940), published in the US as Sergeant Lamb’s America.

It did get me thinking about the old man and his legacy. I recently put together a few notes about him in my post on UK War Poets, and I've written other posts about him over the years. You can find a reasonably complete bibliography of his works here. In publishing terms, however, the jewel in his crown would have to be the grandly titled "Millennium Graves Programme." Over a period of roughly fifteen years, from 1995 to 2010, Carcanet Press in Manchester reissued his collected works in 25 volumes.

There are, to be sure, gaps in their coverage: all the major novels are there, along with the short stories and the complete poems, but only a selection of his non-fictional prose is included. But then, I guess that was the point of the whole project: not so much to compile a complete works as a judicious selection of everything that remains of permanent value in Graves's bewilderingly vast oeuvre.

I don't have all the volumes by any means, but I do have (almost) all of their content in one form or another. Here's the list, in chronological order, as it stands at present:

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Robert Graves: The Complete Poems in One Volume (2000)

And here are some rather more detailed listings, with the date and publication information of each volume. The ones I own are marked with an asterisk, and my own copies are listed below:

The Millennium Graves Programme
Programme editor: Patrick Quinn
(Carcanet Press)
[25 vols: 1995-2010]

Books I own are marked in bold:

1. The Centenary Selected Poems. Ed. Patrick Quinn. Carcanet Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet Press, April 1995.

"Since 1975 when the last substantial Selected Poems was published, Robert Graves's poetic reputation has rested on only part of his work: he edited, and edited out, much that was crucial to his development, encouraged by those who at once directed and distorted his course as a poet.
In the centenary of his birth, Carcanet launches an ambitious Robert Graves Programme which, over the next decade, will bring into print all his major work, commencing inevitably with the poems, and a Selected which begins to redefine the poet. This book is a forerunner of the three-volume Collected Poems, the first volume due this autumn.
These 151 poems allow Graves, the arch-reviser endlessly tightening and sharpening his poems, to speak with his original voice, before the White Goddess induced him to tone down the cries of the neurasthenic war poet's nightmares, or to tamper with his achieved juvenilia. By including more of the historical context, the book gives readers a chance to follow Graves's progress from aspiring Georgian schoolboy to mature voyager under the protection of the Black Goddess. Some of the poems included will be unfamiliar, having been long suppressed."




2. *Collected Writings on Poetry. Ed. Paul O'Prey. Lives and Letters. Manchester: Carcanet Press, June 1995.
   • Collected Writings on Poetry. Ed. Paul O'Prey. Robert Graves Programme. Ed. Patrick J. M. Quinn. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited / Paris: Alyscamps Press, 1995.

"Born on 24 July 1895, Robert Graves had a richly literary early environment. His father was a poet and a schools inspector. He followed, with firmer tread, in his father's footsteps. Admired in his pram by Swinburne, he was not permanently damaged by the meeting but, as a scholarship boy, went to Charterhouse and then to Oxford. His course was interrupted by the First World War, in which his poetry began to mature and in which he was famously reported slain in action in 1916. Shell-shocked, he went on to St John's, Oxford. There in 1918 his hugely prolific writing life began in real (prose and verse) earnest.
The phases of his critical writing are radically distinct, linked by a serious creative intent and by a remarkable eloquence. From the 1925 volume Poetic Unreason and Other Studies to his collaborative works with Laura Riding (not included here, but perhaps in a later joint volume), to The Common Asphodel (1949) and other work, much of it hitherto scattered, Graves's concerns and discoveries are risky and often momentous. It is as though, almost single handed through the harsh anti-Romantic years and into the decades of irony, he had maintained and defended the lyric tradition, making it classical and viable against the tide, again and again. As advocate, polemicist and mythographer, his work in verse and prose has exercised a constant influence on poets, readers and critics ill at ease with fashion and hungry for the sustaining traditions that underlie the merely conventional."




3. *Complete Short Stories. Ed. Lucia Graves. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, September 1995.
   • Complete Short Stories. Ed. Lucia Graves. 1995. London: Penguin, 2008.

"The ever-popular novelist and story-teller Robert Graves wrote fascinating and durable stories, here collected together in a single volume for the first time by the poet's daughter Lucia Graves.
"Robert Graves (1895-1985), poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Athough he produced over 100 books he is perhaps best known for the novel I, Claudius (1934), The White Goddess (1948) and Greek Myths (1955). Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, South London. His father, Alfred Percival Graves, was a school inspector, and his mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves, was a great-niece of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1866). He was educated at Charterhouse, and awarded a B.Litt by St. John's College, Oxford after his return from World war I, where he served alsongside Siegfried Sassoon. Robert Graves died in 1985 in Deja, the Majorcan village he had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War) since 1929.
General Editor of the Robert Graves programme, Patrick Quinn is Professor of English Literature at University College Northampton. He is author of The Great War and Missing Muse: The Early Poetry of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, editor of Re-charting the Thirties, New Perspectives on Robert Graves, and The Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series volumes on English Great War poets. He is the former editor of Gravesiana: The Journal of the Robert Graves Society and Focus on Robert Graves and His Contemporaries. He edited the Centenary Selected Poems for the Robert Graves Programme."




4. *Complete Poems Vol I: 1914-1927. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Carcanet Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet Press, November 1995.
   • Complete Poems, Volume 1. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Manchester & Paris: Carcanet & Alyscamp Press, 1995.

"This is the first of the monumental three-volume Complete Poems of Robert Graves, edited by Dunstan Ward and the poet's widow Beryl Graves. It restores hundreds of poems that Graves omitted from the canon or overlooked in his continual refinements and, with its scholarly apparatus, will lead to a revaluation of his entire poetic oeuvre. Randall Jarrell wrote: 'Some [of the poems] are extraordinary, many are masterly, all are like nothing else ever written in them many things -- some of them most unusual things -- are well felt, well seen, well imagined, and well expressed.'"




5. *The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. 1948. Ed. Grevel Lindop. Lives and Letters. Manchester: Carcanet Press, October 1997.
   • The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. 1948. Amended and Enlarged Edition. 1961. Ed. Grevel Lindop. 1997. London: Faber, 1999.
   • The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. 1948. Amended and Enlarged Edition. 1961. London: Faber, 1977.

"First published in 1948, The White Goddess is one of the century's most extraordinary books. A poet's impassioned introduction to the world of poetry, it is also a great scholar's quest for the meaning of European mythology, a polemic about the relations between man and woman, and an intensely personal document. In it Robert Graves explored the sources of his inspiration and, as he believed, of all true poetry. He also came to terms with memories of his painful but formative relationship with Laura Riding, and made peace with his family's Irish inheritance as poets, scholars, and contributors to the Irish Literary Revival. It stands beside Yeats' A Vision as a major work of modern myth-making, and the clarifications it wrought in Graves' own mind made possible the writing of some of his finest poems. Certainly no one can fully understand Graves, or his poetry, without reading The White Goddess.
This new edition incorporates major corrections to the text, including for the first time all Robert Graves' final revisions, as well as his replies to the book's reviewers and his own account of the months of inspiration in which The White Goddess was written.
The poet Grevel Lindop is also the editor of Thomas de Quincey, a biographer and essayist. He is currently Professor of Romantic and Early Victorian Studies at the University of Manchester."




6. *Complete Poems Vol II: 1927-1942. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Carcanet Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet Press, October 1997.
   • Complete Poems, Volume 2. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1997.

"In this second volume of the Complete Poems all of Robert Graves's work from 1927 to 1942 -- the Laura Riding Period, as series editor Patrick Quinn describes it in the Centenary Selected Poems -- is included. `The Cool Web', `Flying Crooked', `Down, Wanton, Down!', `Never Such Love', `Danegeld', `Parent to Children' and other favourite anthology pieces date from this rich period in which Robert Graves makes the astonishing transition from his early work and becomes incontestably one of the great lyric poets of the century."




7. I, Claudius & Claudius the God. 1934. Ed. Richard Francis. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, November 1998.
   • I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius. 1934. London: Arthur Barker Limited, 1936.
   • Claudius the God and his Wife Messalina. 1934. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1947.

"These novels depict one of the strangest and most terrifying epochs in the history of Europe, as the Roman empire fell into the hands of cruel, mad, incompetent emperors: Tiberius, Caligula, Nero.
In these dangerous times, Graves's hero, the scholarly Claudius, isolated by a speech impediment and physical weakness, takes refuge in his reputation as a fool, in order to survive. He tells the story in the first person, until the first person is silenced and the final testimony is entrusted to others.
Despite his longing for a quiet life, Claudius's shrewdness and cunning, his understanding of the forces of history, even ironically his decency, lead him inexorably to an unwanted destiny as emperor and god.
These shocking and yet oddly comic novels depict the licentiousness and rapacity that triggered the power struggles of ancient Rome. Published in the 1934 as dark clouds once more gathered over the western world, they dramatise the always unresolved struggle between anarchy and social order, and in doing so explore the strength and limitations of the values of decency and reason when confronted by evil.
The novelist and critic Richard Francis is Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. His most recent award-winning novel is Taking Apart the Poco Poco. In his introduction to the Claudius novels, Dr Francis sets the books in the context of Graves's own work, considers its Roman history and psychology, and reflects more largely on the nature of the genre and on Robert Graves's central contribution to it."




8. The Sergeant Lamb Novels. ['Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth', 1940; 'Proceed, Sergeant Lamb', 1941]. Ed. Patrick Quinn. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, September 1999.
   • Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth. 1940. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1945.
   • Proceed, Sergeant Lamb. 1941. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1946.

"The life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence, was the subject of a novelistic enterprise originally published in two parts because of war time paper shortages. The final result is a pair of picaresque novels concerned with the passions and frustrations of a distant war which mirrored many of Graves' own feelings for the Second World War which was happening around him. As an account of the struggle for independence, the horrors and excitements of war, the two novels were well reviewed and popular when published in the early Forties. This chance to have both parts of what Graves considered to be a single project in one volume offers the unique opportunity of access to a literary and historical gem which both opens up the world of the American War of Independence, and the creative life and mind of a great writer of our age.
Carcanet's ROBERT GRAVES Programme brings into print, over the next decade, the bulk of Graves' writings in verse and prose in new editions with introductions by poets, scholars and other authorities.
Programme editor: Patrick Quinn."




9. *Complete Poems Vol III: 1942-1975. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Carcanet Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet Press, November 1999.
   • Complete Poems, Volume 3. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1999.

"After Laura Riding had parted company with him in 1942, Robert Graves moved into a new and decisive phase in his work, producing the White Goddess and the Black Goddess poems. This final volume of the Complete Poems brings together the last three decades of the poet's work, among the poems the most original and least familiar of his writings, showing him at the end as the mature voyager under the protection of the Black Goddess. Many of the poems are previously uncollected."




10. *Some Speculations on Literature, History and Religion. Ed. Patrick Quinn. Lives and Letters. Manchester: Carcanet Press, August 2000.
    • Some Speculations on Literature, History and Religion. Ed. Patrick Quinn. Robert Graves Programme. Ed. Patrick J. M. Quinn. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2000.

"Mycology, psycho-analysis, music, mythology, linguistics, Christianity, occultism, Majorca, esoterica ... This book for the first time selects the best from the more than five hundred essays which Robert Graves wrote about areas of culture which engaged him. His critical diversity illustrates his eclectic interests and his dazzling genius in making connections. He engages every kind of reader; whether we agree or disagree, and he sharpens our own critical skills even as he informs and entertains us.
His first journal article was written in 1913. He was seventeen. It was a critique of popular music entitled 'Ragtime', published in the Charterhouse school magazine The Greyfriar. A lifetime later, his final published essay was fittingly called 'All Things to All Men' and published in 1977 in Malahat Review. For sixty-four years of a turbulent century Graves trained a wary eye, passionately and wryly, on social and political change, popular culture, religion and economics. His range and creative originality set him in a class of his own.
Many of these essays evolved out of Graves' literary pursuits and cast light on his poetry and fiction."




11. *Complete Poems In One Volume. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Carcanet Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet Press, December 2000.
    • The Complete Poems in One Volume. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. 2000. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.

"Carcanet's Millennium Graves programme culminates in the publication of a limited hardcover edition of The Complete Poems of Robert Graves. The celebrated three volume edition was completed in 1999, and with its full scholarly apparatus it ran to in excess of 1,500 pages. This edition of the poems only, intended for the general poetry lover and the collector rather than the scholar, provides definitive texts of all the poetry. The volume represents in its purest form the achievement of Graves's seventy productive years.
Beryl Graves, his widow, translated in collaboration with him Alarcón's The Infant with the Globe (1955). She met Graves in 1937 and continues to live in Canellu.
Dunstan Ward is a Lecturer in English at the University of London's British Institute in Paris, where he has lived since 1973. His publications include Graves's late unpublished poems Across the Gulf (1992), edited with Beryl and Lucia Graves. He is a member of the management committee of the St John's College Robert Graves Trust, Oxford.
Programme editor: Patrick Quinn."




12. Greek Myths. 1955. Ed. Patrick Quinn. Lives and Letters. Manchester: Carcanet Press, July 2001.
    • Greek Myths. 1955. Rev. ed. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1958.
    • The Greek Myths. 2 vols. 1955. Rev. ed. 1958. Rev. ed. 1960. Pelican Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
    • The Greek Myths. 2 vols. 1955. Rev. ed. 1958. Rev. ed. 1960. Introduction by Kenneth McLeish. Illustrations by Grahame Baker. 1996. London: The Folio Society, 2000.

"The Greek Myths has long been among Graves' most popular works, compendious in scope and lively in the telling. No poet of the twentieth century, not even Ezra Pound, was so compendiously learned as Graves in the origins of our Mediterranean cultures. While his approach to myth is original and sometimes contentious, his narrative is always compelling.
Graves tells the myths of creation, the origins of the Gods and their lives, the exploits of the heroes and the Trojan War. The retelling is modern but the matter is not modernised: Graves is alive to the vivid otherness of the world he evokes. The Greek Myths are more than cultural archaeology: it recovers the coherence of the ancient world.
Graves' organisation and comparisons of sources infer connections, common themes, synergies and tropes; his riskiest conclusions are persuasive because of the energy and penetration of his mind. He sees history, not psychology, through the myths and suggests that they have actual occasions which, in the telling and retelling, became charged spiritually, maturing into the coherence of religion.
The Greek Myths, a reference book or as an exploration of our common roots is corrected in a limited edition as part of the Millennium Graves Programme."




13. Homer's Daughter & The Anger of Achilles. 1955 & 1960. Ed. Neil Powell. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, July 2001.
    • Homer's Daughter. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1955.
    • The Anger of Achilles: Homer’s Iliad. Trans. Robert Graves. London: Cassell, 1960.

"We don't know who, or even if, Homer was. Given threads of internal evidence in the Odyssey, Robert Graves invents, or discovers, that the author of the poem was a woman, herself part of the epic action. He chooses the beguiling, clear-headed Nausicaa and re-visions the post-Trojan world through her eyes. This is the theme of Homer's Daughter, one of Graves' most daring fictional acts.
The Odyssey has been described as a 'women's' epic, full of female characters and different in kind and colour from the Iliad with its tight focus, its largely male world. Graves' Nausicaa is brilliant at telling stories and she recounts speeches with dramatic aplomb. The confrontations in the Council and between Aethon and the suitors are memorably evoked.
Nausicaa is a princess of mixed Greek and other ancestry, combining in herself the various cultures that inform the language and folklore of the epic. Graves makes it possible for us to believe that the epic's author told her own story, a true one, buried within the Homeric epic. There is adventure and intrigue; the book stands near the beginning of a tradition that includes Leonardo Sciascia's The Council of Egypt and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
Homer's Daughter is reprinted here with Graves' ambitious Homeric translation The Anger of Achilles, which culminates in the death of Hector, emblem of the doom of Troy itself."




14. *[with Laura Riding] Essays From Epilogue 1935-1937. Ed. Mark Jacobs. Carcanet Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet Press, August 2001.
    • [with Laura Riding]. Essays From 'Epilogue' 1935-1937. Ed. Mark Jacobs. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2001.

"The Epilogue essays, published when the literary partnership of Laura Riding and Robert Graves was at its height, illustrate their working relationship and the back-ground to their later very different careers.
Conceived in the mid-1930s by Laura Riding, Epilogue: A Critical Summary was originally to be called The Critical Vulgate, a title suggesting that the thematic concerns of the project would go well beyond the merely literary, attempting to discover, in a secular spirit reminiscent of Voltaire's, the truth regarding all sorts of subjects, from God down. In 1935 'The Idea of God' led off the extraordinary experiment of Epilogue. The effort was to be encyclopaedic, and in this respect the project foreshadows Riding's later life-work, the massive Rational Meaning which she and her husband Schuyler B. Jackson undertook.
The original four volumes, published by Seizin Press (Majorca) and Constable jointly, are now extremely scarce. Quite apart from their considerable intrinsic interest, they offer rich source material for the two authors. Laura (Riding) Jackson never reprinted any of her Epilogue work, while Robert Graves republished some of his, in revised form. This selection alerts general readers to a rigorous, impassioned and remarkably alive creative and critical moment."




15. [with Laura Riding] A Survey of Modernist Poetry & A Pamphlet Against Anthologies. 1928. Ed. Patrick McGuinness & Charles Mundye. Lives and Letters. Manchester: Carcanet Press, September 2002.

"The books paired here make up the first collaborative study of 'Modernist' poetry by two of the twentieth century's most important and original poets. In A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Laura Riding and Robert Graves produce a contemporary reaction to the early experimentation of writers such as Eliot, Pound and e.e.cummings. Their close critical readings are deployed, along the way, in an engagement with Shakespeare's punctuation, issues of populism and elitism and an attempt to define - perhaps to invent - that elusive creature known as 'the common reader'.
The Survey contains groundbreaking readings of modern poems and movements and is an illuminating and polemical account of the beginnings of modernism. It is an important resource but also a valuable critical text in the reception and development of modernist poetry in English. A Pamphlet Against Anthologies is an entertaining tirade against the perceived iniquities of the trade anthology. A statement of poetic integrity, it poses awkward questions about the production and consumption of art in the mass markets of twentieth and twenty-first centuries."




16. The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr Milton & The Islands of Unwisdom. 1943 & 1949. Ed. Simon Brittan. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, January 2003.
    • Wife to Mr Milton: The Story of Marie Powell. 1943. Chicago: Academy Chicago Limited, 1979.
    • The Isles of Unwisdom. 1949. London: Readers Union / Cassell & Company Ltd., 1952.

"In The story of Marie Powell, Wife to Mr. Milton (1943) Robert Graves - half a century before Carol Ann Duffy - creates a Mrs for a famous Mr, a Mr who Graves regards as one of the heinous monsters in the English poetic pantheon. Certainly his Mrs Milton is ill-used by a distended genius.
Milton's first wife was sixteen when they married. Milton was after her dowry and when it did not follow he proved a domineering and prig, unresponsive to her sensuousness or her down-to-earth wit. It was a spiritual misalliance, too: her Catholicism sorted ill with his beliefs. The dramatic political and military events of the English civil war touch her life at every point, and we witness the execution of Charles I close up. The depiction of everyday life at the time and the merciless portrait of the young Milton, are spell-binding.
The Islands of Unwisdom (1949) is also a true story, but visits a different, very Catholic world, that of the expeditions of the Spanish explorers and discoverers, near contemporaries of Milton but not emancipated by the Reformation, who come unstuck in the New World. Graves reconstructs the ill-fated voyage of Alvaro de Mendana y Neya to find the Solomon Islands, popularly believed to constitute the fabled Land of Ophir, where King Solomon got his legendary wealth. With Don Alvaro sails his wife Ysabel, a key figure in the narrative."




17. *Antigua, Penny, Puce & They Hanged my Saintly Billy. 1937 & 1957. Ed. Ian McCormick. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, January 2003.
    • ‘Antigua, Penny, Puce’ and They Hanged My Saintly Billy. 1936 & 1957. Ed. Ian McCormick. Robert Graves Programme. Ed. Patrick J. M. Quinn. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2003.
    • ‘Antigua, Penny, Puce’. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
    • They Hanged My Saintly Billy. 1957. A Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1962.

"Antigua, Penny, Puce (1937), a barbed tale of sibling rivalry, gave its title to a never-issued one penny puce-and-white stamp from Antigua with George VI's portrait on it and three puce pigs eating at a puce trough. Jane and Oliver are the siblings who fight for possession of the stamp. Philip Larkin praisede it as 'unique among novels' for 'its variety of original invention, not to mention its humour'. It can be read as a political parable about colonialism and the conflict in Spain between Communists and the Fascists.
They Hanged my Saintly Billy (1957), Graves' last major novel, is subtitled The Life & Death of Dr William Palmer and, like much of Graves' fiction, is based on fact, in this case the life of a notorious surgeon, racehorse owner and a confessed forger who got girls into trouble, doped horses, robbed a few people. But, Graves' novel asks, was he a poisoner? Palmer's actual trial took place in 1856, and the novel, as we would expect of a writer with Gfraves' classic skills, has all the immediacy and spiciness of contemporary life. It is told through interviews with Palmer's friends and foes, and we are involved in piecing the tale together.
Programme editor: Patrick Quinn."




18. The Golden Fleece & Seven Days in New Crete. 1944 & 1949. Ed. Patrick Quinn. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, February 2004.
    • The Golden Fleece. Overseas Edition. London: Cassell & Co., Ltd., 1944.
    • The Golden Fleece. 1944. London: Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd., 1983.
    • Seven Days in New Crete: A Novel. London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1949.
    • Seven Days in New Crete. 1949. Introduction by Martin Seymour-Smith. Twentieth-Century Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

"In The Golden Fleece (1944), Robert Graves liberates the tale of Jason and the Argonauts from its status as a children's story and reconstitutes it as a fully fledged epic.He fills his Argo with a colourful, quarrelsome and accident-prone crew, whose mission to recover the Golden Fleece is endangered less by enemies (who, with a little help from the gods, are readily outwitted) than by foibles such as Butes' disastrous fondness for the wrong sort of honey.Hercules, a sulkily temperamental giant, leaves the expedition halfway through, but Medea joins and saves it. The book has the narrative verve and sly wit of Graves's better-known historical novels.
Seven Days in New Crete (1949; also published as Watch the North Wind Rise) is, unusually among Graves's novels, set in the future; but it is the exact opposite of science fiction, for the New Cretans have abandoned twentieth-century technology in favour of a magical, matriarchal society in which wars are conveniently fought between breakfast and tea and casualties can be swiftly reborn.The time-travelling narrator, a distinctly Gravesian poet called Edward Venn-Thomas, is the bringer of necessary chaos. His job it is to disrupt a benign, complacent world with unsettling creativity, assisted by others with recognisable origins in the author's own life.
Both books belong to the period during which Robert Graves was working on The White Goddess (1948), and they share its concerns with matriarchal deities and the creative reinterpretation of mythology."




19. Count Belisarius & Lawrence and the Arabs. 1938 & 1927. Ed. Scott Ashley. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, June 2004.
    • Count Belisarius. 1938. London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1962.
    • Count Belisarius. 1938. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954.
    • Lawrence and the Arabs. Illustrations ed. Eric Kennington. Maps by Herry Perry. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1927.

"First published in 1938, Count Belisarius is one of Robert Graves's most consistently popular novels. A historical romance of the sixth century AD, it tells the story of Belisarius, the last of the great generals of the Roman Empire, who reconquered Africa and Italy for the emperor in Constantinople, only to be rewarded with suspicion and humiliation. Lawrence and the Arabs also tells of a military hero, but one whom Graves knew personally and who was still living when this first authorised biography was published in 1927. Both as an attempt to tell the story of the Arab Revolt and Lawrence's place in it, and as an instalment in the growth of the legend of 'Lawrence of Arabia', it is an important historical and literary document. Read together, these books show Graves exploring the nature of heroism in a world grown profoundly suspicious of heroes."




20. [with Raphael Patai] The Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. 1964. Ed. Robert A. Davis. Lives and Letters. Manchester: Carcanet Press, May 2005.
    • [with Raphael Patai]. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. 1964. An Arena book. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1989.

"For thirty years Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, one raised a strict Protestant, the other a strict Jew, were close friends and collaborators. That collaboration culminating in the book Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis; 'we never disagreed on any question of fact or historical assessment'. They collected traditional Hebrew myths that amplify (and sometimes subtly change) stories found in the Book of Genesis. They go beyond the Christian biblical and Judaic versions of Hebrew myth, and use midrashim, folk-tales, apocryphal texts and other sources to nuance, extend and complete the stories.
'Myths are dramatic stories that form a sacred charter either authorising the continuance of ancient institutions, customs, rites and beliefs in the area where they are current, or approving alterations,' says the introduction. Those are the very myths that lie at the base of all the great Semitic monotheistic religions, the myths from which so many of our own structures and concerns spring. Part of the mission of this book is to see through from the authorised Bible texts to the suppressed and censored pre-Biblical accounts. Patai and Graves approach their subject with firm scholarship and informed inference, and as we read we become aware of shadows, colours, intensities, coming back into stories we thought we knew.
Like Graves's celebrated The Greek Myths, to which Hebrew Myths serves as a companion volume, this is an invaluable source book and reference tool, but it is also a fascinating text to read sequentially. From it emerges a rich sense of a culture in the making, a culture consisting of oral and literary traditions, where the spiritual is deeply rooted in landscape and history."




21. King Jesus & My Head! My Head!. 1946 & 1925. Ed. Robert A. Davis. Lives and Letters. Manchester: Carcanet Press, February 2006.
    • King Jesus. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1946.
    • King Jesus. 1946. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1983.
    • [My Head! My Head! Being the History of Elisha and the Shulamite Woman; with the History of Moses as Elisha related it, and her Questions put to him. London: Martin Secker, 1925.]

"This volume brings together two historical novels based upon the Bible. King Jesus is a daring rewriting of the Gospels in the light of Graves's speculations in history and mythology. His Jesus is a charismatic religious reformer dedicated to the ethical and spiritual principles of an austere Judaism and firmly opposed to the legalism of the Temple authorities, the oppressions of imperial Rome and the allure of an older matriarchal goddess cult subtly subverting his ministry. Graves's daring rewriting of the Gospels portrays Jesus as fully human, yet marked with sacred royalty, bent upon a doomed confrontation with external enemies and internal doubts that lead to a conclusion at once inevitable and unexpected.
Written in 1925, My Head! My Head! was Robert Graves's first novel - a retelling of the story of Elisha and the Shunamite woman. He amplifies the brief Old Testament story into a series of dramatic encounters between the wandering prophet and his inquisitive, quick-witted hostess, who, by skilful questioning, prizes from Elisha the secret religious history of ancient Israel and the true story of the patriarch Moses. Graves uses the extended dialogue of Elisha and Jochebed to elaborate his own unorthodox theory of the origins of primitive Judaism and the role of Moses in the eventual triumph of the cult of Jahweh over the other desert religions of the time."




22. [with Alan Hodge] The Long Weekend & The Reader over Your Shoulder. 1940 & 1943. Ed. Michelle Ephraim. Lives and Letters. Manchester: Carcanet Press, December 2006.
    • [with Alan Hodge]. The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939. 1940. London: Readers’ Union Limited, 1941.
    • [with Alan Hodge]. The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1943.

"From the perspective of the early 1940s, Robert Graves and his co-author of The Long Weekend, the journalist and historian Alan Hodge surveyed the darkening interwar years from 1918 to 1939 with wit, insight and a passionate curiosity about the idiosyncrasies that make up the spirit of an age. Nothing escaped their eye for the telling detail: the price of milk and suburban house names; hairstyles and left-wing theatre, dance crazes, the popularity of boxing, the spread of Woolworth's stores... Personalities of the time are deftly captured, the course of politics and international affairs lucidly traced towards the crises of the late 1930s. In a ground-breaking work of social history as colourful and engaging as a novel, Graves and Hodge never lose sight of the larger significance of the changes they record in a world moving towards the outbreak of war.
The Reader Over Your Shoulder, a critical history of and handbook to style in English prose, develops the authors' social analysis in its focus on language. In its emphasis on the importance of clarity and accuracy in communication, it remains an invaluable guide for writers and readers."




23. Goodbye to All That & Other Great War Writings ['Goodbye to All That', 1929; 'Postscript to Goodbye to All That', 1930; 'But It Still Goes On: A Play in Three Acts', 1930]. Ed. Steven Trout. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, Dec 2007.
    • Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. 1929. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929.
    • Goodbye to All That: New edition, revised, with a prologue and epilogue. 1929. London: Cassell & Company Ltd, 1957.
    • Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. 1929. Ed. Richard Perceval Graves. Providence, RI & Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 1995.
    • 'But It Still Goes On' (1930). Included in: Occupation: Writer. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1951.

"This volume brings together all three of Robert Graves's most significant prose writings on the meaning of the Great War: the original 1929 edition of Good-bye to All That, the essay 'A Postscript to Good-bye to All That' (1930), and the play But It Still Goes On (1930). These last two works, which have been long out of print, provide an invaluable context for Graves's classic autobiography. The 'Postscript', Graves's reflections on the nature of personal literature written about the Great War, is a fascinating complement to Good-bye to All That, illuminating Graves's own stance in his war memoir. But It Still Goes On, a play too controversial to be staged in the 1930s, explores the cultural and emotional wasteland of postwar England. Steven Trout's detailed introduction places all three works within their cultural and biographical context and, in particular, explores the complexities of the truth claims and dark humour in Graves's account of his experiences on the Western Front.
This is the only edition of Graves's work to present the original 1929 text of Good-bye to All That alongside 'A Postscript' and But It Still Goes On, making available crucial texts for any Graves scholar or student of First World War literature."




24. Translating Rome [Apuleius: 'The Golden Ass', 1950; Lucan: 'Pharsalia', 1956; Suetonius: 'The Twelve Caesars', 1957]. Ed. Robert Cummings. Carcanet Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet Press, Jan 2010.
    • Apuleius, Lucius. The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass. Trans. Robert Graves. 1950. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950.
    • Lucan. Pharsalia: Dramatic Incidents of the Civil Wars. Trans. Robert Graves. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.
    • Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius. The Twelve Caesars. Trans. Robert Graves. 1957. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.

"In his translations of three major works from the Roman world, collected in a single volume for the first time, Robert Graves brings the myths, legends and history of the classical world to life. His translations influenced a generation of readers and writers when they were first published in the 1950s. As Robert Cummings demonstrates in his introduction, Graves sometimes overrides the demands of accuracy; his interpretations of and responses to his material are at times idiosyncratic but, ‘Whatever complaints are lodged against Graves’s translations, he remains, after fifty years, eminently readable.’ Graves himself recognised the translator’s problem: ‘how much is owedto the letter, and how much to the spirit’. It is the novelist’s narrative virtuosity, his flair for catching a character’s individual voice, and above all his endless curiosity about the world, that make these translations as compelling as they were to their original audience; they also mirror Graves’s interest in myth in The White Goddess and his imaginative recreations of the classical world in I, Claudius and Claudius the God.
The Golden Ass is an essential work in European literature, a magical, sometimes bawdy adventure, to which Graves responds with exuberant delight. In contrast, Lucan’s Pharsalia, an account of the civil war between Julius Casear and Pompey, raises for Graves issues of the writer’s moral responsibility, the rejection of rhetoric, that in his own time, he writes, had sent poets ‘marching through the Waste Land’ after the Great War. The Twelve Caesars exemplifies the writer’s responsibility to the truthful record in its vivid accounts of the corruptions of arbitrary power."




25. [with Joshua Podro] The Nazarene Gospel Restored. 1953. Ed. John Presley. Carcanet Fiction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, Dec 2010.
    • [with Joshua Podro]. The Nazarene Gospel Restored. London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1953.

"The Nazarene Gospel Restored is Robert Graves’s major work on the life of Jesus, written in collaboration with the distinguished Hebrew scholar Joshua Podro. The research and writing occupied them for over ten years, in a working relationship compounded, in John W. Presley’s phrase, ‘of argument, scholarship and mutual respect’, in which the imaginative writer and the Hebraist drew on their vast knowledge of the ancient world to reveal an extraordinary new, ‘true’ story of Jesus. The result is, as Graves wrote to T.S. Eliot, ‘a very long, very readable, very strange book’, and one that Presley argues is as central to Graves’s thought as The White Goddess. The Nazarene Gospel Restored was controversial when first published: the Church Times refused to advertise it, reviews were hostile, and Graves twice sued for libel. In the twenty-first century it is possible to read it in the context of a continuing engagement with the historical Jesus, both scholarly and popular.
In this new edition, John W. Presley gives a detailed account of the composition and reception of the book, setting it in the context of Graves’s writing and of biblical scholarship. The inclusion of Graves’s Foreword and annotations for a projected revised edition make this an indispensable resource."

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Graves & Riding: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1928 / 2002)

You'll observe that the only substantive item missing from my own collection is the joint Robert Graves / Laura Riding volume containing their Survey of Modernist Poetry & Pamphlet Against Anthologies (both published in 1928).

I'm still on the lookout for that, but at present it's actually easier to buy first editions of the original books than this now quite scarce Carcanet edition. The same is true of The Nazarene Gospel Restored, above: there are far more copies of the 1953 first edition available online than there are of the Carcanet one.

Graves & Podro: The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953 / 2010)

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• category - English Poetry (post-1900): Alphabetical

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