The Crowning Privilege
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rcwnlng privilege, DATE DUE .. ' {' tit! - "I was never one to stroll down the street with a catapult and break windows the tinkle of just for the fun of hearing faces out glass and seeing furious peering as I scuttle away. But to break windows from the inside amounts, at times, to a bursts civic duty. One smells gas, open the kitchen doors, turns off the oven one's tap, wraps a towel around fist, and breaks every pane in the kitchen window." Robert Graves has smelt gas in the houses of virtually all the great poets. Throwing open the doors and smashing the windows, he invites the reader in for a grand, hilarious, and irreverent dis- memberment of the demigods of poetry -from Milton to Dylan Thomas. No one but a master scholar, a master such an wit and linguist could challenge master overwhelming force; no one but a a heart the poet could see with such light the art. For ultimate possibilities of poet's Graves's central idea is that the crowning his freedom privilege the poet enjoys is his from all responsibility except to Muse, whom Graves calls "the White Goddess." While But this privilege is also a duty. Graves shows a deep and lasting admira- con- tion for great poetry, he is mainly cerned and fiercely impatient with those artists who have forsaken their instead on the poetic integrity to rely dubious judges of the non-poetic world: the the critics, the publishers, and readers. THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE OTHER WORKS BY ROBERT GRAVES INCLUDE". Poems, 1914-1926, Heinemann; Doubleday, 1927 Collected Poems 1938, Cassell, 1938; Random House, 1939 Collected Poems 1914-1947, Cassell, 1948 Poems and Satires 7951, Cassell; Creative Age Press, 1951 Poems 1953, Cassell; Creative Age Press, 1953 Collected Poems 1955, Doubleday, 1955 The English Ballad, Benn, 1926 Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure (Lawrence and the Arabs) Goodbye to All That, Cape; Smith, 1929 The Real David Copperfield I, Claudius, Barker; Smith, 1934 Claudius the God, etc., Barker; Smith, 1935 1938 Antigua, Penny, Puce (The Antigua Stamp), Constable; Random House, Count Belisarius, Cassell, 1939; Random House, 1938 T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer, Faber; Doubleday, 1939 Sergeant Lamb's America (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth), Random House, Methuen, 1940 1940 (with Hodge, Alan) The Long Weekend, Faber; Macmillan (U.S.A.), Proceed, Sergeant Lamb, Random House; Methuen, 1941 Writers (With Hodge, Alan) The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for of English Prose, Cape; Macmillan (U.S.A.), 1943 Wife to Mr. Milton, Cassell; Creative Age, 1943 King Jesus, Cassell; Creative Age, 1946 1945 Hercules, My Shipmate (The Golden Fleece), Cassell; Creative Age, The White Goddess: An Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Faber; Creative Age, 1948 1949 The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 1922-49, Hamilton, The Islands of Unwisdom, Cassell, 1950; Doubleday, 1949 Seven Days in New Crete (Watch the Northwind Rise), Cassell; Creative Age, 1949 The Golden Ass (translation), Penguin, 1950 Occupation: Writer, Cassell; Farrar Straus, 1950 Double- (with Podro, Joshua) The Nazarene Gospel Restored, Cassell, 1953; day, 1954 Homer's Daughter, Cassell; Doubleday, 1955 The Greek Myths, Penguin (England and U.S.A.), 1955 1955 Cross and Sword (translation from Spanish), University of Indiana Press, The Infant with the Globe (translation from Spanish), Faber (Trianon Press), 1955 Adam's Rib, Faber (Trianon Press), 1955 The Crowning Privilege, Cassell, 1955 . Winter in Majorca The Crowning Privilege COLLECTED ESSAYS ON POETRY by ROBERT GRAVES DOUBLEDAY & INC. GARDEN COMPANY, ? CITY, NEW YORK, 1956 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 56-6542 First published 1956 in the United States Copyright 1955 by Robert Graves. All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States at The Country Life Press, Garden City, New York Designed by Patricia Walsh First Edition To the Masters and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; in gratitude Bookmobile Jgg6 FOREWORD It is doubtful whether lectures intended for delivery to a largely undergraduate audience, and therefore addressed in the first place to the passions, should be published as though they were closely argued critical essays. But such is the custom with the annual Clark Lectures sponsored by Trinity College, Cambridge; and so I have done no more with this year's batch than to check my facts and re- store a few passages extemporaneously omitted after an anxious glance at the lecture-room clock. Professor F. W. Bateson, who was up at Oxford with me just after the First World War, has been good enough to read proofs, ' in but My subject was: Professional Standards English Poetry ', I am using the title of the first lecture for this book, since it is en- larged with several essays on poetry or related topics, and a broadcast ' ' piece. The crowning privilege of the English poet is, as I explain, his membership of a wholly anarchic profession. No craft-school grants him diplomas; no Royal Academy grades his technical capac- ities; no General Council disciplines him. His responsibility must be to the Muse alone, a stern taskmistress never satisfied with any per- formance offered her. He will speak his mind about poetry without polite qualification (short of committing treason or obscene libel), but remains always in a minority of one, unless he breaks with poetic tradition by organizing a clique, pleiad or movement in Continental style, Deyd, Majorca, Spain R. G. CONTENTS FOREWORD 9 THE CLARK LECTURES, 1954-1955 15 i The Crowning Privilege 36 ii The Age of Obsequiousness 55 in The Road to Rydal Mount 79 iv Harp, Anvil, Oar 1^ v Dame Ocupacyon 119 vi These Be Your Gods, O Israel! VARIOUS ESSAYS ON POETRY 145 Mother Goose's Lost Goslings The Old Black Cow I 60 166 The Essential E. E, Cummings 171 Juana de Asbaje 181 Poems by Juana de Asbaje, with translations The Poet and His Public: A Home Service Broadcast 189 196 Best Man, Bore, Bamboozle, Etc. 201 Theft 210 Kynge Arthur Is Nat Dede 216 Dr Syntax and Mr Pound 11 CONTENTS THE COMMON ASPHODEL Loving Mad Tom 221 Nietzsche 239 Coleridge and Wordsworth 250 Keats and Shelley 260 Lucretius and Jeans 268 How Poets See 280 ' ' Mad Mr. Swinburne 293 The Ghost of Milton 296 The Common Asphodel 308 THE CLARK LECTURES 1954-1955 LECTURE I THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE My gratitude to the Trinity College authorities for having thought of me when they chose this year's Clark Lecturer, is tinged with a cer- tain surprise. I have been domiciled in Spain for nearly twenty-five years, and not lectured at an English University since the First World War. In 1917, I was quartered at Wadham College, Oxford, where my audience consisted of officer cadets, mostly from oversea, and my subjects were tactics, leadership, morale, the use and maintenance of weapons, military law, map-reading, and the conduct expected of an officer and gentleman. An ideal audience, because whoever yawned or doodled in his notebook, or argued the toss, or dared to look at ' me with what we called dumb insolence ', was liable to be returned to his unit: which, in 1917, usually meant the trenches. While giving these cadets a three months' intensive course in professional military also standards, I had to be practical, and also downright. And hum- ble: most of them were older than I, and had a better general educa- tion. Today I am equally humble, with all the awkwardness of a grey- but headed backwoodsman (toting my billy, frying-pan, and axe); intend to be equally practical and downright. which Before discussing professional standards in English poetry, an are the general topic of these lectures, let me emphasize important Unlike stockbrokers, soldiers, sailors, doctors, lawyers, and point. A parsons, English poets do not form a closely integrated guild. poet without the tedious may put up his brass plate, so to speak, prelimi- books and satis- naries of attending a university, reading the required to no General Coun- fying examiners. Also, a poet, being responsible can never be unfrocked, cil, and acknowledging no personal superior, on cashiered, disbarred, struck off the register, hammered 'Change, of conduct. or flogged round the fleet, if he is judged guilty unpoetic 16 THE CLARK LECTURES The only limits legally set on his activities are the acts relating to libel, pornography, treason, and the endangerment of public order. And if he earns the scorn of his colleagues, what effective sanctions can they take against him? None at all. This difference between the poetic profession and others may seem platitudinous, but I shall insist on it all the more strongly; because what English poets have always been free to enjoy, if they please, is the privilege of not being formally enrolled as such. Where is there any official roll of poets, analogous to the Army and Navy Lists, the Medical Register, or Crockjord? This general privilege, as I under- stand it, implies individual responsibility: the desire to deserve well of the Muse, their divine patroness, from whom they receive their unwritten commissions, to whom they eat their solitary dinners, who confers her silent benediction on them, to whom they swear their secret Hippocratic oath, to whose moods they are as attentive as the stockbroker is to his market. I do not, of course, suggest that every English poet has always been sensible of this crowning privilege, or even aware that the Muse has a real existence as real, for her devotees, as Karl Marx's existence, or Freud's, or Aquinas's, to theirs. Indeed, when a few years ago I pub- lished a book in the Muse's honour, The White Goddess, several self- styled poets mistook her for an improvisation of my own.