Graves and the Goddess is a collection of essays edited by Ian Firla and Grevel Lindop offering perspectives on The White Goddess, its origins, and influences f rom a variety of viewpoints, including biography, cultural history, literary cri ticism, textual studies, and Celtic studies, exploring the personal and historic al tensions which shaped the book, the challenges of interpretation it poses for the reader, and its influence on the poets whom it has inspired.

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Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society.

In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his wa r neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject t he essential components of the Western idea of reality--reason and predictabilit y. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves's early poems of a f igure he later called "The White Goddess," a being at once terrifying and glorio us, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves's f amily, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski arg ues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy.

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A collection of essays, edited by Ian Firla, focusing on Robert Graves's often neglected novels by some of the leading researchers in Graves studies. Best known as a poet, Graves made his living as a novelist. Most of this novels have remained in print since they were first published in the 1930s. Despite their commercial success, they have received very little critical attention to date. This volume aims to begin redressing that neglect and offers a series of essays by RP Graves, Ian Firla, Grevel Lindop, John Woodrow Presley and John Leonardon the biographical, historical and narratological foundations of some of Graves's best known novels.