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The White Goddess

A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

by Robert Graves

Summary

Graves explores the myth of the White Goddess, the muse of creativity whose roots are in a vast array of ancient myths and legends. This myth had a tremendous influence on his work, leading Randall Jarrell to comment that "Graves's richest, most moving, and most consistently beautiful poems-poems that almost deserve the literal MAGICAL-are his mythic/archaic pieces, all those the reader thinks of as 'White Goddess' poems." Graves wrote this book in three weeks, in 1948.

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Media Reviews

"[Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, Graves's post WWI neurologist] planted in Graves's mind an interest in matriarchal societies and woman rule, which would later find fuller expression in his controversial work 'The White Goddess'....Later, [Laura Riding] claimed to have been the source of all Graves's notions of poetry as goddess worship. She was not. She was much more: she was their incarnation."    -- Alastair Reid

"['The White Goddess'] was to become a sacred book to a fair number of poets, and to enjoy a great vogue in the sixties, though more as a 'magic' book than as a brilliantly argued synthesis of all Graves's most fundamental preoccupations....From his vast reading, Graves created a monomyth that gave order to his deepest convictions and restored to poetry some of the sanctity he felt it had lost by neglecting myth for reason....It was, of course, possible to read 'The White Goddess' as pure wish fulfillment, as a projection into human history of precisely what Graves needed to believe in, ingeniously disguised as investigative scholarship, and which would justify the succession of young, beautiful muses whom Graves lit on in his later years....At the time, T.S. Eliot worked for Faber & Faber, and although he was somewhat overawed by the manuscript of 'The White Goddess', he was certain of its importance and agreed to publish the book."    -- Alastair Reid

"All that is finally important to Graves is condensed in the one figure of the Mother-Mistress-Muse, she who creates, nourishes, seduces, destroys; she who saves us-or, as good as saving, destroys us-as long as we love her, write poems to her, submit to her without question, use all our professional, Regimental, masculine qualities in her service....[F]or Graves Life, Death, everything that exists is swallowed up in 'The White Goddess.'"    -- Randall Jarrell

"...[I]n submitting to the dominance of [Laura] Riding, Graves may have known what was good for him. Riding was neither the first nor the last woman to obsess him...but she was the most powerful, and it was only after his years with her that he was able to comprehend his obsession, and to give it a mythological, quasi-anthropological form in the book that he called 'The White Goddess.'"    -- Samuel Hynes

   -- New Republic

"...It is the fantastic theory that has accompanied a marvelous practice: some of the best poems of our time have been written as a result of this (I think it fair to say) objectively grotesque account of reality."    -- Randall Jarrell

   -- Yale Review

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Noonday Pr
Published date: 1997
Size: 5.25 x 8 inches
Weight: 1.2 pounds
Pages: 511

Publisher's Notes

Examines the language of ancient Celtic and Mediterranean poetic myths, probing the role of the all-encompassing female figure, the White Goddess, in the earliest forms of poetry.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Paul & Co Pub Consortium (1999) - from $43.58
• Paperback Reprint - Farrar Straus & Giroux (1997) - from $4.94

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