Dear Editors and List,

I don't know what VN thought of Robert Graves, or vice versa. But they would have found some common ground
in the canonical figures they savaged. Graves did this with great relish in the Clark Lectures of 1955-56 at Cambridge. In Lecture Six, entitled "These be your Gods, O Israel", he got ripped into Yeats (who recycled his wife's automatic writing); those twin anti-Semites Pound and "the poundling", AKA Eliot; Auden ("...a real talent for light verse"); and Dylan Thomas ("...drunk with melody and what the words were he cared not.").

The collection is called "The Crowning Privilege" and his trashing of the icons is absolutely hilarious.  One senses that RG got the same kick as VN did when he told a hall full of undergraduates that Quixote is a cruel, crude old book. In his foreword, Graves says the lectures were intended for delivery to: " ...a largely undergraduate audience, and therefore addressed to the passions..."

He drops asides about "insufferable Kipling", "poor sex-mad DH Lawrence" and "Whitman's barbaric yawp" and many, many more. I loved it. Being otherwise just for the sake of it can sometimes be great fun.

Regards,

Tom (Rymour)

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