Robert Graves

Robert von Ranke Graves was born in Wimbledon in 1895 to an Anglo-Irish father and a German mother, and was educated at Charterhouse, where he was unhappy. He enlisted immediately on the outbreak of the First World War and served as an officer with the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

He was so severely wounded at the Somme in 1916 that his death was reported and his parents received a letter of condolence. He recovered, returned briefly to the front, and was invalided out. His memoir of that period, Goodbye to All That, published in 1929, is one of the essential first-hand accounts of the war and of the England that produced it, and its publication ended several of his friendships, including with Siegfried Sassoon.

He left England in 1929 and settled in Deia on Mallorca with the American poet Laura Riding, remaining there for most of his life apart from the years of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.

Graves considered himself primarily a poet and the historical novels were, by his own account, written to pay for the poetry. I, Claudius and Claudius the God, both published in the mid-1930s, narrate the Julio-Claudian court through the stammering, limping Claudius, whom everybody dismissed and who therefore survived. They won the James Tait Black and the Hawthornden prizes and were adapted by the BBC in 1976 into a series that has substantially replaced the novels in public memory.

He also wrote Count Belisarius, King Jesus, and a large body of criticism and translation. The White Goddess, published in 1948, is his idiosyncratic and enormously influential account of poetic myth, which scholars have largely rejected and poets have continued to read.

He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1961 to 1966. He died in Mallorca in 1985 at ninety.