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Robert Graves and The White Goddess
This lecture took place on 11 November 2004
By Dr Fran Brearton, Queen's University, Belfast
Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948), was described by T. S. Eliot as a 'prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book'. Read as a profession of faith in 'one story only', the book offers an interpretive model for Graves's life and loves. But The White Goddess is about Graves's style as well as theme, a style which, with its rhythmical and syntactical complexities, its reiterations, repetitions and reversals, its playing of surface against depth, and its quality of apprehension, is genuinely innovative. The White Goddess is here re-read as offering insights into poetic form, thereby also affirming Graves's significance to an understanding of twentieth-century poetry.
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