An Anglo-German Irishman who was an English poet. Graves was a master craftsman
in both prose and verse and wrote some of the best love poetry of the twentieth
century. Terse and always lucid, his style is characterised by a plain, sinewy
and forceful diction.

Graves was possessed of an encyclopedic if eccentric erudition and trusted his
intuitions.This quality has been referred to as 'his reasonable and courtly
unreason, his classic tone as he celebrates the irrational.' He liked to tweak
academic noses and some of his theories were doubtless leg-pulls e.g that the
Etruscans must have known about nuclear radiation on account of the hardness
of clay in Etruria. Unlike most of us, his mind was open to the universe of
metaphor.

Philological and other inexactitudes aside, there is more 'truth' in The White
Goddess and The Greek Myths than in those reductionist accounts of antiquity
that merely recount bare facts in a constricted if scholarly manner. Just as
it is possible to read Johnson's dictionary from beginning to end so Grave's
easy style makes The Greek Myths similarly as readable and full of interest.
Perhaps Graves was the last genuine man of letters in a line that extended
from Johnson to himself.

This is the BBC/BL CD supplemented by the Argo and Caedmon recordings plus
a few odds and ends - mp3@160 seems to be about the highest attainable sound
quality for these fifty or sixty year old tapes.

The Poetry of Coleridge . 1-3
Poetry of John Keats - 1 - SamuelWestetalia
T.S.Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral - Argo
Eliot - Four Quartets et alia - 1-4
T.S.Eliot - The Wasteland 1-4
The Poetry of Auden 1-3
The Poetry of Shelley 1-7
The Poetry of Tennyson 1-9

Download File Size:320.5 MB

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