Robert von Ranke Graves
Who was Robert?
Robert Graves was born in London in 1895. His father was Irish, his mother German. He went to school at Charterhouse. During the Great War he was an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and was badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He is known as one of the War Poets.
After the war he married Nancy Nicholson and they had four children. He graduated from Oxford in 1925. By then he had published several volumes of poems and collections of essays.
In 1926 he began a thirteen year collaboration with Laura Riding and, when his marriage broke up, he went with her to Deià, Mallorca, where he built a house with the proceeds of his war memoirs Good-bye to all That. In 1934 he published his best seller I, Claudius, written to pay off a mortgage.
Graves and Riding left the island at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and when their relationship ended, he began another family with his new wife Beryl. He returned to his house in Deià in 1946 with the family, and remained there until his death in 1985.
Robert Graves is one of the great love poets in English language of the Twentieth Century, and his memoirs, his historical novels and books on mythology are much read.
