The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

First published in 1948 by Creative Age Press. First amended and enlarged Noonday paperback edition, 1966. Thirty-fourth printing, 1999. An enormously versatile and prolific writer, translator, and critic, Robert Graves considered himself primarily a poet. Nevertheless, he became best known for his unorthodox historical novels about Rome and for his studies of the mythological and psychological sources of poetry. "The White Goddess" is perhaps his finest and the most popular of these works. In this book Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities, the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death, who was worshipped under countless titles. She was beautiful, fickle, wise, and implacable, and in one of her later forms she is known as the Ninefold Muse, patroness of the white magic of poetry. In this brilliant tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar, mythic language. Robert Graves (1895-1985), born in London, was one of the most talented, colorful, and prolific men of letters in the twentieth century. He is best known for his historical novels, "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God". He spent much of his life on the island of Majorca.