Noted Poet, Biographer Robert Graves, Author of ‘I, Claudius,’ Dies at 90

Robert Graves, whose voluminous output of poems, books and essays made him an icon among the literati but who was better known to the public as the author of two eminently successful volumes about the Roman emperor Claudius, died Saturday at the age of 90.

The perspicacious biographer and translator died in his villa, surrounded by citrus orchards, on Spain’s Mediterranean island of Majorca, where he had spent most of his life save for a few brief periods away in his native Britain.

Graves, suffering from arteriosclerosis, had been under constant medical supervision for 2 1/2 years and was bedridden for several months. Sources close to the family said that his wife, Beryl, was with him when he died.

‘A Much-Loved Man’

Church bells on the island tolled to honor Graves’ passing, said the parish priest, Father Ignacio Montojo.

“He was a much-loved man here,” Montojo said. “He was not Roman Catholic, but the bishop gave us permission to ring the bells for him.”

Robert Ranke Graves was born in London on July 24, 1895. He was educated at Charterhouse, one of Britain’s most prestigious boys’ schools, and wrote his first poem at the age of 13.

For nearly 70 years, Graves’ prose and poetry ran a diverse and curious gamut of history, biography and myth. But through it all was a common theme--that of poetry itself. He was considered the last of the sensuous lyric writers that Ireland and England gave to the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The author of “I, Claudius” and “Claudius the God” came to his leanings through both birth and decision. His father was a poet and songwriter who traced the Gaelic nations through their ballads and whose popularity enabled young Robert to attend fashionable schools where he studied, boxed and played rugby. His distinctive, hooked nose was shaped by a rugby field encounter.

His father’s influence, the son often said, saved him “from any false reverence of poets” and permitted him to resolve his own poetic puzzles.

And although his stanzas were his own, his professional and personal partnership with American poet Laura Riding helped form Graves’ style and credo “truth in words.”

After serving in the trenches during World War I, where he was so seriously wounded that his death was reported in the Times of London, Graves published a small volume of verse, “Over the Brazier,” in 1916. His first book, these poems expressed a young man’s longing for the propriety of his past--his education, breeding and relatively sheltered upbringing, as opposed to his present, layered with physical and emotional war wounds.

Other slight volumes of his war experiences followed, in which the neophyte poet acknowledged the violence that was beginning to shake his complacent faith in any world order. In this work, poignant verses sometimes trailed away into flippant irony, as if to hide from his grim discoveries.

After his discharge, he married Nancy Nicholson, sister of the English painter Ben Nicholson, and settled near Oxford University, where his friends included T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, and the poets John Masefield and Robert Bridges. Through Lawrence he met Ezra Pound, but if he owed that complex and radical poet a debt for his own gradual emergence from Georgian romanticism, Graves never publicly acknowledged it.

Psychiatry Intrudes

Collections of Graves’ work were being published in both London and New York in the early 1920s. They reflected a period when he was mired in his Celtic past but was adapting it to include the 20th-Century realities of psychiatry, whose techniques Graves encountered while being treated for shell shock.

Of that time, he later wrote that he was coming to view the proper function of poetry as providing “the solution of a problem that could not otherwise be formulated and resolved.”

In 1929, although only 34 and still relatively unknown, he published his autobiography, “Goodby to All That,” in which he paid homage to his past, then bade it farewell along with his marriage and the four children it produced. Poetry was now, he said, his therapy--a catharsis both for himself and his readers.

In the interim, he had begun writing books about poems rather than poems to be included in books (“On English Poetry,” “The Meaning of Dreams,” “Contemporary Techniques of Poetry: A Political Analogy”), which in retrospect foretold of his coming break with tradition.

He also had earned a degree at Oxford and to support his family had taken, with Lawrence’s help, a position as professor of English at the University of Cairo. It was to be the only salaried job of his life, and he hated the regimentation.

Writing Style Simplified

After separating from his wife, he began a long personal and artistic association with Laura Riding, a member of the American “Fugitive” school of poetry, establishing the Seizin Press in London with her. The press continued to publish both their works even after they had solidified their personal ties, settling in Majorca. Under her influence, Graves simplified his writing, achieving a clarity in his thinking he had not evidenced before.

They stayed together until 1939, the last year in which she was to write, and that decade gave Graves his greatest novels and other literary triumphs:”The Real David Copperfield,” the two-volume Claudius, “Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth,” based on the diary of a British soldier in the Revolutionary War, and “Antigua, Penny, Puce.”

Graves rehabilitated the half-mad Emperor Claudius I, regarded by historians as a despot. Looking at life in ancient Rome through a philosopher’s eye, Graves made of the dull-witted Claudius a wise protector caught in the midst of excess and violence. A 13-part British Broadcasting Corp. adaptation shown over the Public Broadcasting Service in 1977-78 made Graves a popular, if largely unread, author in this country.

When his long affair with Riding ended, Graves married Beryl Pritchard, and that union produced four more children. With Alan Hodge, Beryl’s estranged husband, he wrote “The Long Weekend,” a social history of Britain between world wars, and “Wife to Mr. Milton,” a novel in which he expressed his personal contempt of the English poet through the character of the Puritan’s wife.

The convention-defying interpretations he gave to Claudius and John Milton he now extended to the Greeks in “The Golden Fleece” and “Homer’s Daughter” and to Christianity itself in “King Jesus.”

Creation, Destruction

In 1962 Graves published “The White Goddess,” an exploration of mythology centered on the matriarchal domination of Greek, Celtic and pagan cultures. In his goddess he found both the impetus for man’s creative endeavors and the seeds of his destruction.

The work, a mix of empiricism and intuition, was seen by scholars as an examination of Graves’ personal muse, a judgment that he validated some time later when he wrote that “the love bestowed on a poet, however briefly, by a Muse-possessed woman heightens his creative powers to an unparalleled degree.”

His translations began to reflect the “truth in words” maxim of his earlier years--his interpretation of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” was as prosaic as the popular Edward Fitzgerald translation was melodic. Many, however, saw it as more true to the intent of the Persian poet.

In the late 1950s, Graves began a series of lecture tours to the United States, and the poet-author’s pronouncements that man could fashion an effective life style despite his spasmodic inspiration and rejection by the women he loves touched a romantic nerve in many Americans.

Graves said that his tours of America heightened his popularity at home.

In 1961, he was elected to Oxford’s Chair of Poetry, and the 140 books and 800 essays and poems he had written now included two works for children--”The Big Green Book” and “Two Wise Children.” His poems were being reviewed in the Times of London, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and it seemed that each year during the 1960s and ‘70s, a new Graves anthology was sent to the printer.

He refused as many honors as he accepted, rejecting the offer by Queen Elizabeth II to make him a Commander of the British Empire but accepting a gold medal from the National Poetry Society of America. (He did, however, accept the queen’s offer of a gold medal for poetry in 1968.)

He held honorary doctorates in literature from universities around the world but minimized such accolades, saying, “The only things I believe in, really, are love and honor.”

Although age bent him gradually, he remained an imposing 6-foot-plus poet-scholar who never learned to drive a car or use a typewriter.

As he observed very late in his life, “I seem to be the last of the old-fashioned men of letters.”

On Majorca, Father Montojo said a funeral service is planned at the mountaintop church overlooking the town of Deya, where Graves’ villa is located.

“He was part of the town,” the priest said. “He wanted to be buried at our cemetery like any other villager.”

Epifanio Apezteguia, the mayor of the small town, said Graves will be buried today in Deya in the presence of family members and villagers who knew him as “Don Roberto.”