Muse and Mother
AT the start of his first Oxford lecture Robert Graves mocks the idea that a French savant or 'a bright young redbrick lecturer' might have anything to say about poetry which could com- pare with the valuable insight of a practising poet—such as Robert Graves. He would have done well to spare himself that sneer. This book —which consists of the three lectures required of him as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, plus three other addresses to Oxford societies—re- veals how sadly trite and arrogantly perverse a poet can be when talking about poetry in general. The lectures show Graves at his least impres- sive: admittedly not dull, but marred by the idiosyncratic deployment of snatches of learn- ing, the ebullient but confusingly eccentric manipulation of mythology, and the apodictic truculence with which some pretty crude ideas are advanced.
Lecture One—"The Dedicated Muse'—hovers around Skelton, asserting that .he was possessed by the Muse without really trying to establish and discuss the qualities of Skelton's best verse. Instead we are given a little sermon in which Robert Graves (the poet) tells us what's what about good and bad poetry. Without acknow- ledging any debt to Nietzsche's richly suggestive use of the Apollonian-Dionysiac opposition, Graves distinguishes between devotees of Apollo and those of the Muse. 'Apollonian poetry is composed in the forepart of the mind : wittily . . . always reasonably, always on a precon- ceived plan. . . . Muse poetry is composed at the back of the mind: an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged. . .
Graves's subsequent dicta on poetry are based on this very crude dichotomy; as though so much great art did not depend for its inner dynamic tension on a state of balanced strife between these two basic desires—the yearning to find form, the instinct to avoid constraint. Graves, roman- tically disparaging intellect, has little to say about the source of discipline, clarity and sharply focused relevance in poetry—was his own best verse really the product of trance and
trance alone? But in Lecture Three (`The Per- sonal Muse') Graves really shows his colours: what he wants is a return to matriarchy and woman-worship. Borrowing—but not acknow- ledging—Bachofen's famous notion that patri- archal societies are based on intellect and law whereas the older matriarchies favoured instinct and custom, Graves insists that poets at least should change their allegiance from the aggres- sive masculine mentality to the wonders of female wisdom.
His prescription is quite specific: all poets must recognise 'the Muse-goddess as incarnate in some particular woman' because `only a per- sonal Muse can open the arcana of poetry to him.' Graves uses these 'ideas' to belittle poets like Donne and Wyatt, who had insufficient re- spect for women—but then 1 doubt whether either of those poets would have quite under- stood Graves's criteria for great poetry. 'The hair stands on end, the eyes water, the throat constricts, the skin crawls, and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true
poem : because this is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother
of All Living, the ancient power of love and terror—the female spider or the queen-bee whose courtship means murder.' Got that, you poets? Of the remaining essays, the last, on certain basic similarities in various notions of paradise,
is the most interesting. Graves discusses the phenomenon of myeophobia—i.e., unreasoning fear of mushrooms—and goes on to suggest that mushrooms containing an hallucigenic drug were widely used in pagan rites before being tabooed by the Christian priests. Quite in the Huxley manner, he discusses the beneficial potencies of psilocybin and peyotl ('the power to enhance personal reality'), but he then goes on to main- tain that he prefers to experience the poetic trance, since the mushroom trance is passive, while the poetic one is active. Good—but I would like to put it to Graves that what makes the poetic trance 'active' is at least partly the Apollonian desire for lucid ordered articulation. But then 1 am no poet, and for Graves only the Muses are heard.
Trust the tale not the teller, said Lawrence. After reading this book I feel impelled to trust the poet, not the Oxford lecturer.
TONY TANNER
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