Books: Legacy of a Cranky Colossus

The death of Robert Graves ends several eras

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Graves' poetry was more austere and subdued. He took no part in the stylistic revolution launched by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His poems stubbornly scanned and usually rhymed. In The White Goddess (1948), he built a huge edifice of eccentric scholarship to prove a personal point: poetry arose in the worship of the Ur-Female and could only be brought back to life by returning to this adoration. That was his lifelong mission, and his love poems praised both joy and sorrow: "Take your delight in momentariness,/ Walk between dark and dark--a shining space/ With the grave's narrowness, though not its peace." Robert Graves was the last Romantic.

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