Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves, c. 1929 -- With Introduction By Miranda Seymour

 First included in Everyman's Library #384, 2018.

Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves, c. 1929.

From the jacket, it begin: 

"One of the best and most famous memoirs of WWI was written a decade after the conflict's end, as the poet and novelist Robert Graves was preparing to leave England for good. 

Goodbye To All That was controversial in its time and has since become a classic, notable for the way it documents not only his personal experience of the horrors and disillusionment of battle but also the wider loss of innocence the Great War brought about."

Also from the jacket:

The best memoir of the First World War. -- Paul Fussell 

Introduction, vii - xix.

Other books by Robert Graves:

• The Greek Myths, c. 1955, 1960
• The White Goddess, no copyright data; published on demand in Coppell, TX, July 24, 2024.

Prolific career:

• 55 collections of poems
• 43 works of non-fiction
• ten translations
• fifteen novels
• one play

GTAT: his only major work of autobiography.

At the time he wrote this book, many veterans of WWI had recently written of their experiences in the trenches.

"Like Graves himself, Ford, Remarque and Sherriff, all of whome had served at the front, viewed war as an essentially futile venture, in which exceptional acts of loyalty and courage became the norm." -- p. ix

Really, really, really a good book on WWI.

To Germany, Robert Graves felt a powerful bond. p. ix

 

Maternal side: German, von Ranke
Pateernal side: French --> Ireland -->

Page 8: the family lineage. Includes a great-uncle or nearly by the name of Robert Graves who was the physician that gave the name to Graves Disease. 

Graves identified the disease in 1835; a Germany physician identified the same disease in 1840 and therefore, in Germany, the disease is better known as "Basedow syndrome" or similar but with Basedow in  the name of the disease.

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The White Goddess

From wiki: 

The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth is a book-length essay on the nature of poetic myth-making by the English writer Robert Graves. 

From his book, p. 6:

My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and this remains the language of true poetry -- 'true' in the nostalgic modern sense of the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute.' 

The language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes. 

Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed practically ever sinec in European schools and universities, where myths are ow studied only as quaint relics of the nursery of mankind. 

One of most uncompromising rejects of early Greek mythology was made by Socrates. 

Myths frighteed of offended him; he preferred to turn his back on them and discipline his mind to think scientifically: 'to investigate the reason of the being of everything -- of everything as it is, not as it appears, and to reject all opinions of which no account cn be given.'  

First published in 1948, it is based on earlier articles published in Wales magazine; corrected, revised and enlarged editions appeared in 1948, 1952 and 1961.  

The White Goddess represents an approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly creative and idiosyncratic perspective. Graves proposes the existence of a European deity, the "White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death," much similar to the Mother Goddess, inspired and represented by the phases of the Moon, who lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies. 

Graves argues that true or pure poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and her son.

This led to this AI prompt:

 It is amazing how often "three-fold" shows up in mythan then aslo in the Christian religion (trinity). Another example: Brigit the three-fold muse. Thoughts?