Robert Graves – A Modernist Nietzschean Poet?

Abstract

The aim of our analysis is to explore the influence of Nietzsche’s aesthetic doctrine on Robert Graves (1895–1985), the famous English poet and novelist. The paradox we lay our emphasis on in the very beginning lies in the fact that Robert Graves used to speak about Nietzsche and his works in a rather deprecatory manner. However, it is too obvious that the views of both authors and their approach to certain key categories of modernism are strikingly similar. The aim of our comparative survey is to juxtapose Nietzsche’s and Graves’s views on history, poetry, the nature of poetic inspiration, and modernist myth- making and to prove that Graves as many other modernist writers, did not escape being influenced, directly or indirectly, by the ideas of the great German philosopher.