Selected Poems

Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, son of the Irish writer Alfred Perceval Graves. He was a professor of English Literature at Cairo University in 1926 and elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1961, but he lived by writing and became known for his unorthodox perspectives. His main vocation was poetry, but he also wrote works of fiction and non-fiction, mainly historical novels, such as Homer's Daughter, I, Claudius, or King Jesus. Among his essayistic books, The White Goddess stands out, which presents a new perspective on the poetic impulse, the compilation of the first modern dictionary of Greek mythology, Greek Myths, and his celebrated autobiography, Goodbye to All That. In 1971 he became a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford. He died in December 1985 in Mallorca, where he had lived since 1929. His British publisher, Penguin, called him 'the greatest poet of love since Donne.'