Robert graves brief biography of thomas

English/Spanish artist, musician and writer

Tomás Graves (born 27 January 1953, Palma de Mallorca, Spain) is a graphic designer, printer, musician and writer. He is the son of the poet Robert Graves and Beryl Graves (née Pritchard).

Biography

In 1964, he began at Bedales boarding school in England. In 1972, he began studying typographic design at the London College of Printing. In 1975, he returned to Majorca and began working as a designer, photographer and musician. In 1979, he travelled to Nicaragua for six months to observe and document the Sandinista revolution in recordings and photographs, and playing with the Teatro Popular Sandinista.

He joined the Mallorcan band, Pa Amb Oli (Bread and Olive Oil) in 1980. The same year, he met his future wife, Carmen. In 1983, Graves and Carmen established the New Seizin Press in Deià, producing entirely hand-made books until 2000. Their daughter, Rocío, was born in 1987, and Tomás and Carmen married in 1996.

He began writing and translating in 1996. His first translation was of Guy de Forestier's Beloved Majorcans into English, followed by his own work in Spanish, Un hogar en Mallorca (A Home in Majorca). Volem pa amb oli was translated as Bread and Oil and has also appeared in Dutch (Brood en olie). His first book written in English was Tuning Up at Dawn.

Books

• A Home in Majorca: Graves' first book, co-written with Pere Joan and published in Spain, is a handbook for people who have settled in rural Majorca. It covers all aspects of Mediterranean life including traditional architecture, rights of way, flora and fauna, water management and village politics.
• Bread and Oil, a collection of recipes and insights centred on the bread and oil that form the staple ingredients of the Majorcan diet. The book concerns not just food but also social history and culture.
• Tuning Up at Dawn combines Graves' reminiscence

War was return of earth to ugly earth, / War was foundering of sublimities, / Extinction of each happy art and faith / By which the world had still kept head in air’

Recalling War (l. 31–34)

Biography

Robert Graves (1895–1985)

Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon to Alfred Perceval Graves, a man of letters and school inspector of Anglo-Irish and Scots descent, and Amalia von Ranke, the niece of the great German historian Leopold von Ranke. In his autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929), Graves describes early visits to his German cousins’ estate, and recounts his unhappy years at Charterhouse School, where he first became involved in writing and editing poetry. At school he also won cups for boxing, and over the course of holidays spent at Harlech in North Wales he developed an interest in mountain climbing.

When war was declared in August 1914, Graves enlisted immediately, despite having secured an exhibition to St John’s College, Oxford. This meant that he went straight from school into the Royal Welch Fusiliers. In Goodbye to All That he records his respect for the history of the regiment and its superb discipline, as well as his discomfort at having secured a commission despite his lack of military experience. He served in France from 1915 – he was made a captain in October that year – to 1917. It was there that he began his friendship with the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow-Fusilier.

On 20 July 1916 during the Battle of the Somme – four days before his twenty-first birthday – Graves was struck by a shell fragment, a piece of which passed through his shoulder and chest, seriously injuring his right lung. He was taken to a dressing-station, and next morning was reported to have died. The Times even printed his name in the list of war dead, later correcting this when it became known that he had survived his wounds and was convalescing in England. Damage to his nerves and gene

Robert Graves signed this portrait for me with his inky pen when I was a student at UCC in 1975. When does our adult life begin? Like the loner Lois in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, I often ask myself that question about beginnings. But I think adulthood began its long beginning for me on that evening in May, 1975, when I was twenty-one, a day when I sat beside Robert Graves and his wife Beryl at the Oyster Tavern in Cork after a wonderful UCC English Literature Society reading. As I wrote in a February Reading List in POETRY, at one point on that evening long ago, Robert Graves at dinner turned to me and said ‘Thomas, I’ve been to Heaven several times this month.’

Around the restaurant table were John and Evelyn Montague and Seán and Pat Lucy, and Theo Dorgan, poet and UCC’s leading student-poet and Graves expert, a youthful master of both The White Goddess and Poetic Unreason. There must have been others there as well, but I can’t remember now. The atmosphere was electric, as it always is when people know that they are in the presence of true literary greatness. Although Graves was 80 years old that summer, his presence was still dominating and overwhelming. He spoke about the past, he had so much of the past to speak about. When I asked him about Edward Marsh’s Georgians and what they were like he said to me that Rupert Brooke was the nicest of the entire circle around Marsh and Harold Munro. He also said that ‘of that lot’ Winston Churchill was the only gentleman. He said that poetry was no longer being written in England but that he got ‘the sense of poetry’ when he landed in Ireland. He believed in these feelings, in hauntings, in the sense of things. But his ‘sense of things’ was wrong because the following decade would see the ‘Martians,’ and the greatest flowering of English poetry since the 1930s; a flowering that continues to this day (just think: Craig Ra

I have a personal definition of what makes a good biography. Solid research and an understanding of the subject are a given, but what separates exceptional biographies from good ones is whether I find myself believing that I’m there with the subject, living the scenes, and experiencing the trials and triumphs. A simpler way to say it is this: Do I identify with the story being told about this person’s life?

Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-Bye to All That 1895-1929 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson is one of those exceptional biographies. Almost all I knew about Graves was that he was the author of I Claudius and Claudius the God, written in the 1930s and popularized on PBS in the 1970s. Derek Jacobi starred in the title role. I was so mesmerized by the TV series that I read both books, learning that Graves had based his fictionalized story on the gossipy account by the Roman historian Suetonius in The Lives of the Caesars.

Reading the poetry and biographies of several of the World War I poets told me Graves was also a war poet. But for some reason he stood outside the better-known poets like Wilfred Owen, Charles Sorley, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg.

This first volume of a planned two-volume biography allowed me to see the man not only in the context of World War I poetry but also in the decade that followed the war. And it confirmed my vague perception that Graves stood apart from his fellow war poets; he wanted it that way and took pains to suppress a lot of his own war poetry. He was so successful that quite a few of his poems were published only after his death.

Robert von Ranke Graves (1895-1985) was the son of a British father and a German mother. His upbringing was conventional middle class. Alfred, his father, was the literary figure in the family, and Amy, his mother, was the religious figure. Both were significant influences on Graves, and both