The Robert Graves Diary Project

Biography

Robert Graves (1895-1985) is a major twentieth-century English poet, novelist and essayist.  After surviving the First World War and subsequent shell shock, he studied at Oxford and began to publish poetry.  He married Nancy Nicholson in 1917 and they had four children.  In 1926 he met Laura Riding, the American poet, whose poetry he had admired from afar.  She became a dominant influence in his life and work.  In the late twenties they began an intense working relationship which lasted for over ten years.  They founded the Seizin Press together, and in 1929 they moved to Deyá, Majorca.  The novels that made Graves famous--Goodbye to All That; I Claudius and Claudius the God--were written in this period.  So were many poems, essays and prose pieces, which, notably in the Epilogue series edited by Riding, document their theories concerning writing and the role of poetry, as well as their life together and that of the little coterie of writers and artists they gathered around them. The diary, in its detached recording of day-to-day activities, contains evidence of the disciplined nature of their partnership.  Graves regularly submitted his work to Riding’s strict editorial scrutiny: if it did not pass, he would patiently revise it until it was approved. Graves also critiqued Riding’s work, which suggests that their collaboration at this time was mutually beneficial. This was a productive period for both writers.

The diary begins in Deyá in 1935.  The Graves/Riding relationship has started to deteriorate, but there are few overt signs of this tension in Graves’ diary entries, and they continue their writing collaborations.  They move to England in 1936 with the advent of the Spanish Civil War, to France in 1938, and finally in 1939 to the U.S. where both their partnership and the diary ends.  Graves remarried after the war and moved back to Majorca where he settled with Beryl Graves and his second family of four children. Robert Graves died in Deyá, Majorca in 1985 and his wife Beryl remained there until her passing in 2003.