Robert Graves

Born Robert von Ranke Graves on July 24, 1895, in Wimbledon, then in Surrey, the eighth of ten children of an Anglo-Irish poet and Gaelic schools inspector and his second wife, the German grandniece of the historian Leopold von Ranke, he was raised in a household of song, sermon, and Celtic legend. He went to Charterhouse, boxed his way out of bullying for his German middle name, and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, which he deferred to join the Royal Welch Fusiliers in August 1914. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916 a shell wound left him reported dead in the Times; he read his own obituary while recovering. He came home shellshocked, married Nancy Nicholson, took his Oxford degree, and went out in 1929 to live on Mallorca with the American poet Laura Riding, the woman he called his white goddess, leaving wife and four children behind. To pay for the new life he wrote Good-Bye to All That (1929), his unsparing memoir of the war and the world it ended, then the two Claudius novels, I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), the autobiography of the limping, stuttering emperor everyone underestimated. The books won the James Tait Black Prize and were filmed by the BBC in 1976. He produced more than a hundred and forty books in all: poems, criticism, translations of Suetonius and Apuleius, and The White Goddess (1948), his speculative theory of poetry as devotion to a single muse. He held the Oxford Chair of Poetry from 1961 to 1966. He died in Deià, Mallorca, on December 7, 1985, at ninety.

In July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, a shell fragment tore through Graves's chest. His colonel wrote home reporting him dead, and the Times printed the notice. Recovering in hospital days later, Graves read his own obituary, startled to find himself already mourned by name.