I have often written of Robert Graves, because - with GB Shaw - he was the first grow-n-up writer I engaged with after Lord of the Rings had opened the door to adult literature for me. Both Graves and Shaw were recommended by my father; Graves because of I Claudius and my burgeoning interest in history.
I have - very gradually - come to realize that Graves was almost the opposite of what he claimed to be; but that his claims were believed (by me, and many others) because he was a superb (the word is intended descriptively) non-fictional prose writer.
Graves claimed to be primarily a poet, a lyrical poet; in opposition to those well-connected and socially-endorsed Apollonian versifiers of intellect and scholarship that Graves contemptuously dissected and vilified in his critical writings.
But in truth, Graves was not a lyrical poet, and was instead exactly the kind of poet his writings rejected. He was an upper class, academic, uninspired clique "poet" - one of a closed circle of mutual admiration and log-rolling.
Contrary to his own claims; he expended great energy on un-poetic/ anti-poetic activities such as wire-pulling, self-promotion, image-management and the like. He acted a part of an impoverished wild and Celtic bard; yet was actually a wealthy and influential - and hard-working - bohemian Norman; doing exactly the kind of stuff that bohemian Normans had been doing for generations.
Outside this group of not-poets, none of Graves verses have achieve the spontaneous endorsement and love of those who are a part of the (now extinct, apparently) tradition of English lyrics (i.e. the Palgrave's Golden Treasury tradition)
Graves has several great qualities - including an unexcelled prose style. In a sense he was a great critic of historical poetry - although his judgement of modern (20th century) poetry was so wrong as to be inverted.
But Graves was fraudulent in his nature; he lived a lie. At one level (although nothing like so deep as he claimed) Graves wanted to be something he was not, a poet; but pretended to be it anyway, and worked to persuade as many others as possible.
In this respect he resembles Charles Williams - although Williams was lower middle class, not a Norman. Williams wanted to be a poet but wasn't; and expended great energies on literary, critical and educational activity to persuade others to endorse himself as a poet. And yet also, he did not want to be a poet as much as he pretended to himself, because he dissipated most of his time and energy on hack works - apparently undertaken so that he could have extra income for a more self-indulgent lifestyle.
In sum; Graves was himself exactly the kind of pseudo-poet, fake poet; whose verse is not divinely inspired but instead the consequence of scholarship and intelligence; skeletal structures decorated with borrowed or stolen plumage taken from real poets.
Graves's critical strictures were therefore projection; he publicly excoriated in others his own unacknowledged faults, deficiencies. And by this means Graves concealed from himself (?) and others - his own innate nature, origins, workings, status, and stature.
Graves's great advantage over his fellow not-real-poets came from his prose non-fiction - works such as The White Goddess, his brilliant and calculatedly-dishonest autobiography Goodbye to All That, or his critical lectures and essays such as The Common Asphodel.
Critical and historical prose by which Graves created a mythology of which he was arbiter, and by which he was defined as a true muse-poet.
It is, apparently, all there, all explained, all in-place... except for some actual real poems!
**
The lesson I draw from this is general. It is, I think, easy to be misled by propaganda, including self-propaganda; and especially when it emanates from a ruling class who control so much of the social institutions, and whose members often operate in mutually reinforcing cliques and factions. This misleading can go even so far as inversion: such that what is supposed is the opposite of what is actual.
A supposedly beautiful person, building, or piece of music may actually be soulless ugliness; an alleged truth-breakthrough of science or medicine may actually be a tissue of invention and calculated; distortion; a promoted pattern of virtue in a person (or institution) may be actual evil of a very extreme kind.
And such inversions are often achieved by implication and projection; by such double-negations. Those who are most self-consciously the opposite of Good, have insider knowledge of the workings of that which opposes good; and can therefore provide convincingly detailed analyses of the projected evils of their enemies.
Political leaders, for instance; very often do in actuality precisely those things that they vocally and theoretically eschew; and absolutely do not do anything effective to deter or suppress those phenomena they rhetorically oppose.
This is why it is so often observed that those active in charities against specific abuses; often themselves engage in exactly these abuses - and indeed use the organization and resources of their charities the better to prosecute these vices.
In such a world as we now inhabit, this phenomenon of projection is very general in the high status officialdom and media; to the point almost of universality.
Consequently, it is vital to look behind the rhetoric; to observe what is actually done (and not done) and consciously to deploy our innate capacity of intuitive inference.
