Horace Gregory
ROBERT GRAVES: A PARABLE FOR WRITERS
There is something about the wntmgs and career of
Robert Graves that should point a moral, or be at least, a parable
for other writers of our day. The writings-and in particular, the
recent poems, show a hard-won, hard-bitten, roughly accomplished
independence which sloughs off critical patronage as well as its praise
and blame, and there is much to praise and blame in the writings
of Robert Graves.
The literary scene in London today is densely gray; the blood
runs sluggishly through undernourished veins of recent English let–
ters: Bloomsbury is dead,
Horizon
is gone. Since W. H. Auden left
England for the United States, there has been no new poet of his
stature, either of his age or younger than he, to fill the gray spaces
between Oxford and Cambridge, or in London itself, between Cheyne
Walk and Russell Square.
1
The paradox is that the newest of new
poetry published in London arrives from points outside of England,
from Roy Campbell, so recently returned from Spain as to be un–
affected by the present British literary climate, from Edwin Muir,
whose temper has always been unobtrusively Scotch and who now
1.
I am aware Dylan Thomas arrived after Auden, that his writings are not
mediocre-but he still remains a figure of limited resources and of unfulfilled
promises: witness his latest book,
In Country Sleep,
which contains but six poems
none of them better than the earlier poems and reciting the same virtues and
flaws for which he is known-and this extremely slender book represents his
writings of the last six years! He is afflicted at an early age with the Swin–
burnian disease of echolalia; he has not enough to say, and his two poems,
"Lament" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", good as they are,
are not much more than variations on the theme of approaching death done
better and not so long ago by W. B. Yeats. I am also aware that Walter de la
Mare and the Sitwells are writing supremely well, but these are established poets
and have been so for the last quarter of a century.
