Robert Graves Quotes

Because the world is in a sick condition and we are all somehow infected, against our will, even if we think we are whole in mind and soul and body. ~ Robert Graves

Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they're dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person's integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with - that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That's what love is. It's a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can't love. ~ Robert Graves

True poetry (inspired by the Muse and her prime symbol, the moon) even today is a survival, or intuitive re-creation, of the ancient Goddess-worship. ~ Robert Graves

Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true ... Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as: 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?' ... The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs. ~ Robert Graves

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive. ~ Robert Graves

England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible. ~ Robert Graves

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman. ~ Robert Graves

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings. ~ Robert Graves

I had chosen the fifteenth day of July, the day that Roman Knights go out crowned with olive wreaths to honor the Twins in a magnificent horseback procession:from the Temple of Mars they ride through the main streets of the City, circling back to the Temple of the Twins, where they offer sacrifices. The ceremony is a commemoration of the battle of Lake Regillus which was fought on that day over three hundred years ago. Castor and Pollux came riding in person to the help of a Roman army that was making a desperate stand on the lake-shore against a superior force of Latins; and ever since then they have been adopted as the particular patrons of the knights. ~ Robert Graves

For words of rapture groping, they"Never such love," swore "ever before was!" ~ Robert Graves

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope. ~ Robert Graves

His one fault, if you may call it so, was that he kept silent in the presence of evil when speech would not remedy it. ~ Robert Graves

I have done many impious things
no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes. ~ Robert Graves

The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his. ~ Robert Graves

Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible. ~ Robert Graves

I don't answer questions about conjectures. ~ Robert Graves

The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but "accessory" in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this. ~ Robert Graves

From husks and rags and waste and excrement
He forms the pavement-feet and the lift-faces;
He steers the sick words into parliament
To rule a dust-bin world with deep-sleep phrases.

When healthy words or people chance to dine
Together in this rarely actual scene,
There is a love-taste in the bread and wine,
Nor is it asked: "Do you mean what you mean?"

But to their table-converse boldly comes
The same great-devil with his brush and tray,
To conjure plump loaves from the scattered crumbs,
And feed his false five thousands day by day.

- Hell ~ Robert Graves

Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer. ~ Robert Graves

So when I'm killed, don't wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me, Or you must wait for evermore. You'll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you've read. ~ Robert Graves

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing. ~ Robert Graves

The Cabbage White
The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has- who knows so well as I?-
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift. ~ Robert Graves

Black drinks the sun and draws all colours into it.
I am bleached white, my truant love. Come back,
and stain me with the intensity of black. ~ Robert Graves

If I were a young man With my bones full of marrow, Oh, if I were a bold young man Straight as an arrow, I'd store up no virtue For Heaven's distant plain, I'd live at ease as I did please And sin once again. ~ Robert Graves

You know how it is when one talks of liberty. Everything seems beautifully simple. One expects every gate to open and every wall to fall flat. ~ Robert Graves

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out. ~ Robert Graves

One smile relieves a heart that grieves. ~ Robert Graves

Every fairy child may keep Two strong ponies and ten sheep; All have houses, each his own, Built of brick or granite stone; They live on cherries, they run wild I'd love to be a Fairy's child. ~ Robert Graves

The Blue Fly"

Five summer days, five summer nights,
The ignorant, loutish, giddy blue-fly
Hung without motion on the cling peach
Humming occasionally 'O my love, my fair one!'
As in the canticles.

Magnified one thousand times, the insect
Looks farcically human; laugh if you will!
Bald head, stage fairy wings, blear eyes,
A caved-in chest, hairy black mandibles,
Long spindly thighs.

The crime was detected on the sixth day.
What then could be said or done? By anyone?
It would have been vindictive, mean, and what-not,
To swat that fly for being a blue-fly,
For debauch of a peach.

Is it fair either, to bring a microscope
To bear on the case, even in search of truth?
Nature, doubtless, has some compelling cause
To glut the carriers of her epidemics -
Nor did the peach complain. ~ Robert Graves

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love. ~ Robert Graves

A sullen pier-glass, cracked from side to side,
Scorns to present the face (as do new mirrors)
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.

- The Pier-Glass ~ Robert Graves

There's no money in poetry. Then again, there's no poetry in money either. ~ Robert Graves

No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation - in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least. ~ Robert Graves

In Dedication.

All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean -
In scorn of which I sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom I desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.

It was a virtue not to stay,
To go my headstrong and heroic way
Seeking her out at the volcano's head,
Among pack ice, or where the track had faded
Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers:
Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's,
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips.

Green sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir
Will celebrate the Mountain Mother,
And every song-bird shout awhile for her;
But I am gifted, even in November
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
I forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Careless of where the next bright bolt may fall. ~ Robert Graves

As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned. ~ Robert Graves

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either. - Robert Graves ~ Robert Graves

We are entrusted, you must know, with the revision of the English Dictionary. On the evidence of the Liverpool find of Christmas cards, in which occurred such couplets as:

Just to hope the day keeps fine
For you and your this Christmas time,

and:

I hope this stocking's in your line
When stars shine bright at Christmas-time

I hold that "Christmas-time" was often pronounced "Christmas-tine", and that this is a dialect variant of the older "Christmas-tide". Quant denies this, with a warmth that is unusual in him.'
'Quant is right. ~ Robert Graves

Another leading senator that I degraded was Caligula's horse Incitatus who was to have become Consul three years later. I wrote to the Senate that I had no complaints to make against the private morals of this senator or his capacity for the tasks that had hitherto been assigned to him, but that he no longer had the necessary financial qualifications. For I had cut the pension awarded him by Caligula to the daily rations of a cavalry horse, dismissed his grooms and put him into an ordinary stable where the manger was of wood, not ivory, and the walls were whitewashed, not covered with frescoes. I did not, however, separate him from his wife, the mare Penelope: that would have been unjust. ~ Robert Graves

The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people's wills. ~ Robert Graves

One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors. ~ Robert Graves

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people. ~ Robert Graves

Welsh Incident

'But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.'
What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?'
Nothing at all of any things like that.'
What were they, then?'
'All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.'
Describe just one of them.'
'I am unable.'
What were their colours?'
'Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you'd like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.'
'Tell me, had they legs?'
Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.'
But did these things come out in any order?'
What o'clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?'
I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thrity-seven shimmering instruments
Collecting for Caernarvon's (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth's mayor addressed ~ Robert Graves

Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy fine,
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine.
No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry plucked in June
Beside the trickling stream.
One such to melt at the tongue's root,
Confounding taste with scent,
Beats a full peck of garden fruit:
Which points my argument. ~ Robert Graves

Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company ... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand. ~ Robert Graves

Yet let me warn you to beware of the one-sandalled man: he will hate you, and before he has done his hatred will make mince-meat of you. ~ Robert Graves

Manticor in Arabia

(The manticors of the montaines
Mighte feed them on thy braines.--Skelton.)


Thick and scented daisies spread
Where with surface dull like lead
Arabian pools of slime invite
Manticors down from neighbouring height
To dip heads, to cool fiery blood
In oozy depths of sucking mud.
Sing then of ringstraked manticor,
Man-visaged tiger who of yore
Held whole Arabian waste in fee
With raging pride from sea to sea,
That every lesser tribe would fly
Those armed feet, that hooded eye;
Till preying on himself at last
Manticor dwindled, sank, was passed
By gryphon flocks he did disdain.
Ay, wyverns and rude dragons reign
In ancient keep of manticor
Agreed old foe can rise no more.
Only here from lakes of slime
Drinks manticor and bides due time:
Six times Fowl Phoenix in yon tree
Must mount his pyre and burn and be
Renewed again, till in such hour
As seventh Phoenix flames to power
And lifts young feathers, overnice
From scented pool of steamy spice
Shall manticor his sway restore
And rule Arabian plains once more. ~ Robert Graves

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them. ~ Robert Graves

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good. ~ Robert Graves

As you are woman, so be lovely: As you are lovely, so be various, Merciful as constant, constant as various, So be mine, as I yours for ever. ~ Robert Graves

We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder. ~ Robert Graves

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon. ~ Robert Graves

On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word. ~ Robert Graves

Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage Once more with pomp and greed and rage; Courtly ministers will stop At home and fight to the last drop; By the million men will die In some new horrible agony ... ~ Robert Graves

Time is not the stable moving-staircase that prosemen have for centuries pretended it to be, but an unaccountable wibble-wobble ~ Robert Graves

But [I] had sworn on the very day of my demobilization never to be under anyone's orders for the rest of my life. Somehow I must live by writing. ~ Robert Graves

Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued. ~ Robert Graves

Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill. ~ Robert Graves

A song? What laughter or what song
Can this house remember?
Do flowers and butterflies
Belong to a blind December? ~ Robert Graves

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties. ~ Robert Graves

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made. ~ Robert Graves

'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book. ~ Pat Barker

Is that the Three-and-Twentieth, Strabo mine,
Marching below, and we still gulping wine?"
From the sad magic of his fragrant cup
The red-faced old centurion started up,
Cursed, battered on the table. "No," he said,
"Not that! The Three-and-Twentieth Legion's dead,
Dead in the first year of this damned campaign -
The Legion's dead, dead, and won't rise again.
Pity? Rome pities her brave lads that die,
But we need pity also, you and I,
Whom Gallic spear and Belgian arrow miss,
Who live to see the Legion come to this,
Unsoldierlike, slovenly, bent on loot,
Grumblers, diseased, unskilled to thrust or shoot.
O, brown cheek, muscled shoulder, sturdy thigh!
Where are they now? God! watch it struggle by,
The sullen pack of ragged ugly swine.
Is that the Legion, Gracchus? Quick, the wine!"
"Strabo," said Gracchus, "you are strange tonight.
The Legion is the Legion; it's all right.
If these new men are slovenly, in your thinking,
God damn it! you'll not better them by drinking.
They all try, Strabo; trust their hearts and hands.
The Legion is the Legion while Rome stands,
And these same men before the autumn's fall
Shall bang old Vercingetorix out of Gaul. ~ Robert Graves

You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these? ~ Robert Graves

He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about. ~ Robert Graves

Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples. ~ Robert Graves

Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence.
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality. ~ Robert Graves

All forms of literature are dangerous; but in none is the danger more acute than in historical fiction... ~ John Julius Norwich

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time. ~ Stephen Hawking

To resist the social pressure now put even on one's leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one's own way, than ever before. ~ Robert Graves

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic. ~ Robert Graves

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. ~ Robert Graves

To Juan at the Winter Solstice

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether as learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison to all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin's silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling,
How many the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

Much snow if falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:Robert Graves