Robert Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985), whose second name is sometimes given as von Ranke, was an English poet, novelist and critic. His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were both Celticists and students of Irish mythology.
Robert Graves produced more than 140 works in his lifetime. His poems, his translations, and innovative analysis of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life—including his role in the First World War, Good-Bye to All That (1929), and his speculative study of poetic inspiration in The White Goddess (1948), have never been out of print. He was also a renowned short story writer, with work such as "The Tenement" still read.
Graves earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius (1934), Count Belisarius (1938), and King Jesus (1946). He was also a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular for their clarity and entertaining style. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.
Graves's eldest half-brother Philip achieved success as a journalist, and his younger brother Charles was a writer and journalist.
Graves was born into an upper-middle-class family in Wimbledon, then part of Surrey, now part of south London. He was the eighth of ten children born to Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931), who was the sixth child and second son of Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. His father was an Irish schools inspector, Gaelic scholar, and the author of the popular song "Father O'Flynn"; his mother, Amalie Elisabeth Sophie von Ranke (1857–1951), a grandniece of the historian Leopold von Ranke, was his father's second wife. One of his many uncles was the officer commanding the Nore during the First World War, Admiral Sir Richard Poore.
At the age of seven, double pneumonia following measles almost took Graves's life, the first of three occasions when his doctors despaired of him as a result of afflictions of the lungs; the second was the result of a war wound, while the third came when he contracted Spanish influenza in late 1918, immediately before demobilisation.
Graves's birth was registered in 1895 under the name of Robert Ranke Graves. He was baptised into the Church of England as "Robert Ranke" on 1 September 1895 at Wimbledon.
In 1909, Graves was enrolled at Charterhouse School as Robert von Ranke Graves. On 15 August 1914, he was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers under this name, and it appeared in The London Gazette again when his commission was confirmed in March 1915. However, he appears to have soon abandoned the addition of "von", as during the First World War having a German name caused him difficulties.
On 23 January 1918, Graves married Nancy Nicholson at St James's Church, Piccadilly, under his true name of Robert Ranke Graves.
In Germany, Graves's books are usually published with "von" included in his name.
Graves received his early education at a series of six preparatory schools, including King's College School in Wimbledon, Penrallt in Wales, Hillbrow School in Rugby, Rokeby School in Wimbledon and Copthorne in Sussex, from which last in 1909 he won a scholarship to Charterhouse. There he began to write poetry and took up boxing, in due course becoming school champion at both welter- and middleweight. He claimed that this was in response to persecution because of the German element in his name, his outspokenness, his scholarly and moral seriousness, and his poverty relative to the other boys.
He also sang in the choir, meeting there an aristocratic boy three years younger, G. H. "Peter" Johnstone, with whom he began an intense romantic friendship, the scandal of which led ultimately to an interview with the headmaster. However, Graves himself called it "chaste and sentimental" and "proto-homosexual", and though he was clearly in love with Peter (disguised by the name "Dick" in Good-Bye to All That), he denied that their relationship was ever sexual. He was warned about Peter's "proclivities" by other contemporaries.
Among the masters, his chief influence was George Mallory, who later died trying to scale Mount Everest, and who introduced him to contemporary literature and took him mountaineering in the holidays. In his final year at Charterhouse, he won a classical exhibition to St John's College, Oxford, but did not take his place there until after the war.
At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant (on probation) on 12 August. He was confirmed in his rank on 10 March 1915, and received rapid promotion, to lieutenant on 5 May 1915 and to captain on 26 October. In August 1916 an officer who disliked him spread the rumour that he was the brother of a captured German spy who had assumed the name "Karl Graves". The problem resurfaced in a minor way in the Second World War, when a suspicious rural policeman blocked his appointment to the Special Constabulary.
He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about the experience of frontline conflict. In later years, he omitted his war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom", though the early "In the Wilderness" was retained. On 20 July 1916 at High Wood during the Battle of the Somme, he was so badly wounded by a shell fragment through the lung that he was expected to die and was officially reported as having died of wounds. He gradually recovered and, apart from a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England.
One of Graves's friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer in his regiment. They both convalesced at Somerville College, Oxford, which was used as a hospital for officers. "How unlike you to crib my idea of going to the Ladies' College at Oxford," Sassoon wrote to him in 1917. At Somerville College, Graves met and fell in love with Marjorie, a nurse and professional pianist, but stopped writing to her once he learned she was engaged. About his time at Somerville, he wrote: "I enjoyed my stay at Somerville. The sun shone, and the discipline was easy." In 1917, Sassoon rebelled against the conduct of the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves feared Sassoon could face a court martial and intervened with the military authorities, persuading them that Sassoon was experiencing shell shock and that they should treat him accordingly. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Edinburgh, where he was treated by W. H. R. Rivers and met fellow patient Wilfred Owen. Graves was treated here as well. Graves also had shell shock, or neurasthenia as it was then called, but he was never hospitalised for it,
I thought of going back to France, but realized the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover.
The friendship between Graves and Sassoon is documented in Graves's letters and biographies. The intensity of their early relationship is demonstrated in Graves's collection Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), which contains many poems celebrating their friendship. Sassoon remarked upon a "heavy sexual element" within it, an observation supported by the sentimental nature of much of the surviving correspondence between the two men. Through Sassoon, Graves became a friend of Wilfred Owen, "who often used to send me poems from France".