Books, Arts & Manners: Spellbound

Robert Graves: His Life and Work By Martin Seymour-Smith

Holt, 609 pp., $22.50 I interviewed Robert Graves on Majorca in the summer of 1970 and was impressed by his rugged grandeur, irritated by his arrogance, and perplexed by his murky theories of Mariolatry among the Arabs. He flatly contradicted my suggestion (confirmed in this book) that his poem “Children of Darkness” (in which unborn infants spur their parents to procreative lust) was inspired by his hero T. E. Lawrence: “I was never influenced by anyone! I always influenced other people!” Martin Seymour-Smith’s lively, sympathetic, perceptive, definitive biography—which deftly penetrates the minefield of Graves’s agonizing relations with women—reveals why the abjectly submissive poet angrily denied his intellectual debts.

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

Featured Tags

Robert Graves: His Life and Work By Martin Seymour-Smith

Holt, 609 pp., $22.50 I interviewed Robert Graves on Majorca in the summer of 1970 and was impressed by his rugged grandeur, irritated by his arrogance, and perplexed by his murky theories of Mariolatry among the Arabs. He flatly contradicted my suggestion (confirmed in this book) that his poem “Children of Darkness” (in which unborn infants spur their parents to procreative lust) was inspired by his hero T. E. Lawrence: “I was never influenced by anyone! I always influenced other people!” Martin Seymour-Smith’s lively, sympathetic, perceptive, definitive biography—which deftly penetrates the minefield of Graves’s agonizing relations with women—reveals why the abjectly submissive poet angrily denied his intellectual debts.