Abstract: This report details the proceedings and outcomes of the First International Pop-up Seminar on ‘Robert Graves: Life, Poetry, Poems’, co-organised by Michael Joseph and Adriana Marinelli. Held on the Zoom platform on 7 May 2025. The seminar brought together international scholars and writers, to explore his poetic oeuvre. Focused on poetry as Graves’s sole vocation, the event highlighted his complex engagement with war, the ancient past, and Graves’s own poetic concerns related to his White Goddess theories. The attendance of over forty participants underscored the enduring scholarly and public interest in Graves’s work, affirming the need for a constant interdisciplinary dialogue.

Keywords: Poetry, Life, Robert Graves Society, web-based conferences

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Following the Robert Graves Society panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in New Orleans on 10 January 2025, Michael Joseph, the panel’s co-organizer (along with Anett Jessop, who could not be present) and I discussed how we might augment the annual panel at the MLA and a semi-annual conference to increase real-time participation in the scholarly discourse on Robert Graves. We decided to initiate a program of online pop-up seminars on various topics involving scholars and experts from a range of disciplines, beginning with the members of the Robert Graves Society. [1]

For the inaugural seminar, on 7 May 2025, we decided to focus on poetry, Graves’s central literary concern and the area of his principal achievement. Indeed, Graves proclaimed poetry was his ‘ruling passion’ since the age of fifteen’.[2]

During the planning stages, we devised a three-part program that would last about two hours consisting of five paper presentations of approximately fifteen minutes, and a panel discussion of a poem. Between papers, would be oral presentations of a poem or two, in order to present a less discursive experience of Graves’s poetry.

Papers were presented by Lucia Graves, Robert’s daughter, and translator of his father’s work; Charles Mundye, President of the Robert Graves Society and Professor of English Literature at Sheffield Hallam University; Anett K. Jessop, Vice President of North America Robert Graves Society, and Professor of English Literature at Texas University at Tyler; Elena Theodorakopoulos, professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham, UK; and a presentation by Adriana Marinelli, PhD Candidate at Parthenope University of Naples.

Lucia opened the seminar with a personal consideration of ‘To Lucia: A Poem about Birth and War’, a powerful antiwar poem her father dedicated to her at the time of her birth in 1943. Her talk shed light on the poem’s thematic complexities while offering a personal vision of her father.

What he was like as a father. Well, he was just our father, very present in our lives despite the hours spent in his work room. He cared for us at every stage. He told us stories. He and my mother created a stable home for us.

She also talked about her older brother David, who was killed in action around the time of the poem’s creation, and how that loss played into her father’s inspiration.

Charles Mundye expanded on the concern with war, offering an introduction to Graves’s war poetry. He argued that, although the older Graves suppressed his war verses as unpoetic, we need to be fair to the younger Graves – the soldier – and evaluate these poems freed from the censorship of the older Graves.

The historical past provided a crucial theme in the three papers following. Anett Jessop investigated the relevance of place to the lives and literary production of Graves and Laura [Riding] Jackson, his literary partner. While a seemingly unconventional destination compared to the great European capitals, Graves and Riding found powerful inspiration in the Balearic Island of Deià, with its Islamic and Spanish history. Anett also discussed how their home became a meeting place for poets and other cultural figures and observed that although poetry may have been his ‘ruling passion’, living in Deià saw a heightening of Graves’s (and Riding’s) production of novels.

Elena’s research delved into the intricate relationship behind the construction of women ‘and/as myth’ in the poetry of Graves and Riding. Through a comparison between the two poets, she highlighted their unique understandings of womanhood, which, although articulated in modern terms, were firmly rooted in the past. While Riding wittily rejected the idealisation and ornamentation of women, Graves developed a poetic vision of woman aligned with the classical poets. Elena concluded her analysis by referencing the classical portrayal of women as myth, specifically alluding to the Latin poet Propertius. She noted how Propertius depicted women as idealised mythic figures, effectively acting as a Pygmalion in shaping these archetypal effigies.

Adriana also drew on a classical perspective to examine Graves’s criteria for poetry, contrasting his two main classical influences, Virgil and Ovid. Building on the notion of unity of opposites, she reconstructed how and why Graves dismissively framed Virgil as the antipoet par excellence, while valorising Ovid. Along with Elena and Anett, Adriana’s analysis foregrounded the profound importance the classical world held for Graves’s poetry.

The seminar concluded with a panel discussion on the poem ‘Around the Mountain’, featuring three scholar – poets: Dunstan Ward, Rachel Hadas and Sean O’Brien. Dunstan, the co-editor of Robert Graves, The Complete Poems, provided bibliographic information about the poem and its previous drafts, and adumbrated the poem’s resonances of Graves’s quasi-religious belief in The White Goddess. Hadas, the only non-Gravesian on the panel, placed ‘Around the Mountain’ in a rich intertextual dialogue with Edward Thomas’s ‘The Owl’ Robert Frost’s ‘The Thatch’, and James Merrill’s ‘The House’, identifying thematic similarities such as nocturnal journeys, solitude, and shelter, while emphasising Graves’s focus on his own inner turmoil.

Sean’s reading emphasised the stylistic choices of the poem, such as ‘a grammatical clarity and impetus of good prose writing’. He argued that the text highlights Graves’s mastery of language, creating a deceptive simplicity that veils deeper ambiguities, and while the poem appears to offer the disappointed lover the solace of detached self-knowledge, at a deeper level it reaffirms the bleak inescapability of what Sean calls ‘the labyrinth’. A lively discussion following their presentations confirmed the appealing complexity and mystery of the poem. It also persuaded us of the desirability of the panel format for future seminars.

The interstitial readings were given by Paul O’Prey, Michael Joseph, Sean O’Brien and Lucia Graves. Asked to choose poems to read, they chose: ‘Counting the Beats’, ‘The Pier-Glass’, ‘In No Direction’, ‘Vanity’, ‘The Cool Web’, ‘Like Snow’, and ‘She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep’.

Graves’s enduring relevance was evidenced by the number and enthusiasm of the seminar’s attendees. Therefore, the seminar confirmed Michael and my conviction that virtual platforms could facilitate the dissemination of research on Graves, contribute to the scholarly discourse, and excite general interest in Graves’s powerful writing. Moreover, the inherent complexity and richness of the scholarly response to Graves’s oeuvre – including war poetry, classical reception, mythological studies, and biography – suggest the range of viable approaches to be explored. Altogether, the Robert Graves, His Poetry, Life, and Poems suggested the necessity for more focused and dedicated attention to Graves’s work and the utility of internet mediated seminars.

A recording of the pop-up seminar edited with extra illustrations by Michael Joseph can be found at

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knPySx4Zu1Q&t=7081s> [accessed 25 July 2025]

Adriana Marinelli is a third-year PhD Candidate at Parthenope University of Naples. In 2022 she received a fellowship from G. d’Annunzio University (Chieti-Pescara) to conduct her research on Robert Graves and Ovid. She has conducted her research with the Robert Graves Collection, housed in St. John’s College, Oxford. Her research is represented in this journal issue among the critical studies.