For Graves the imagination was not a framer of secondary worlds but an inhabitant of an underlying reality where a fundamental narrative, “one story and one story only”, was always in progress: the poet’s enchantment in the service of the White Goddess, in the worldly form of a Muse. In “Alice”, which imagines the journey through the looking-glass, Graves describes the mirror-world as “true as anything you’d swear to, / The usual three dimensions you are heir to”. When the proliferation of poetry blogs often reveals a hole where the history of the art should be, if anything can alert people to Graves, or make the sceptic reconsider, this generous sample, superbly introduced, should manage it. Michael Longley, editing this selection from Robert Graves, takes it for granted that anyone who reads poetry ought to read Graves, but it’s hard to tell who actually does so.
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