Abstract: Writing ‘Alice’ in 1923 Robert Graves had two and a half primary purposes: to assert the ontological primacy of truth (truth is presented as a reality pre-existing and independent of human judgement), and that truth is apprehended through poetry; and to satirize truth relativism (or alethic relativism), which subordinates poetry to contextual frames. I situate my argument in a metacritique of critics who have posited that Graves viewed the world through a relativist framework and wrote ‘Alice’ to expound relativism to his readers. After the summary of critical views, I perform a close reading of the poem’s most frequently analysed passages and counterpoint relativistic interpretations with my own interpretation. I also place emphasis on Graves’s intertexts from John Skelton and Lewis Carroll, to which critics have given little attention. While critics tended to focus on the original text exclusively, I consider both versions of the poem, the original published in 1925 in Welchman’s Hose, and the 1938 recension, published in Collected Poems 1938 and every subsequent collection.

Keywords: relativism, alethic relativism, criticism, Through the Looking Glass, ‘Alice’, children’s literature, myth and ritual, Welchman’s Hose, John Skelton

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Introduction

Robert Graves wrote ‘Alice’, a poem of fifty lines in rhymed couplets, in 1923 and published it two years later in Welchman’s Hose a miscellany of eighteen poems. The Alice of the title references Lewis Carroll’s Alice, introduced in 1865 in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and revisited six years later in Through the Looking Glass, the framing text (hypotext) for Graves’s poem. Graves revised ‘Alice’ in 1938.[1]

When book-length critical studies of Graves’s poetry began to appear in the 1960s, ‘Alice’ typically figured among the poems discussed. Critics tended to interpret it as Graves’s whimsical celebration for having overcome the ‘unceasing emotional stress’ of life after the war, or as an epistemological argument for relativism, aspects of which critics found in Mock Beggar Hall and in Poetic Unreason. However, Michael Kirkham notes that by 1930, Graves had ‘abandoned the relativist standpoint’[2]. Certainly, by the time he wrote ‘The Cult of Tolerance’, dated 1936, he had formed a hardened antipathy toward it.[3] Had Graves really embraced relativism in the 1920s and abandoned it by 1936?

My contention is that ‘Alice’ strongly suggests Graves had never committed himself to relativism and fully rejected truth relativism (or alethic relativism)[4] by 1923. He famously asserted in 1948 that he has been wholly committed to poetic principles since the age of fifteen, hence it is unlikely that at any time afterwards (or before), he believed that poetic principles were subordinate to framework. I am linking poetry and truth because, as I hope to demonstrate, Graves regarded poetry and truth as entailed. Truth is antecedent to any framework or interpretation by which it might be experienced, and poetry is the best means by which truth may be discovered. The White Goddess is as much an exaltation of truth as it is poetry, and its foreword concludes by pointing reverently toward ‘the truth-possessed poet’.[5]

While the relativisms of early critics (Bullough, Cohen, Day), lack specificity, their arguments suggest epistemic and aesthetic relativisms. Beginning in 1969, criticism (Kirkham) focuses on alethic relativism, on which critics in the 1990s (Quinn, Pharand) converge. Only D. N. G. Carter (1989) declines to endorse the relativist position, stating prudently only that ‘Alice’ is epistemological.

In this essay I consider the psychological interpretation of ‘Alice’ only when it is woven into the relativist. In the introductory part of my essay, arranged chronologically, from 1960 to 1998,[6] I introduce the substantive critical arguments and analyses. In the second part, I develop them more fully and put forward my own interpretation.

Although critics were writing during a time when republications of the 1938 recension were more widely available than the 1925 original version of ‘Alice’,[7] most preferred the original. Since their focus falls broadly on the evolution of Graves’s poetry over several decades, they may have reasoned that a later text would blur biographical lines, and, accordingly, privileged an accurate ontogeny over authorial intention (undertaking the labour of digging up texts that had been out of print for thirty to seventy years, depending on the date the critic was working).[8]

The 1925 ‘Alice’ is a delightful poem in every respect. One deleted passage (l. 14–17) shows Graves’s interest in science and his keen awareness both of Einstein’s experiments and his exasperation with the popular confusion of his theory of relativity with relativism; it also contains an intertext (‘Laws of Light’) linking ‘Alice’ to ‘The Rainbow and the Sceptic’. And the virtuosic Reality passage (l. 29–32) presents a multivocal chorus of three voices simultaneously speaking different aspects of the relativism / absolutist dialectic. All of these passages exemplify the kind of relativist-baiting that inspired my thesis. However, in my view, the leaner 1938 version, with its explicit emphasis on mortality, intensifies and clarifies the arguments of the original. Illuminating Graves’s intentions, it would seem to offer the biographical critic insight and direction. In my discussion, I look at both texts, although, in addressing the critics, I use the earlier text as the centring leg while the later text serves as the describing leg.[9]

Finally, in his essays that criticize relativism, Graves uses the term ‘relativity’ as does Geoffrey Bullough writing in the 1940s, as do critics quoting from those essays, Patrick Quinn and Michel Pharand. The terms are synonymous, and co-exist, although ‘relativity’ tends to appear in earlier philosophical discourse in English and relativism later.[10]

Critics and Criticisms

J. M. Cohen first declared ‘Alice’s’ importance in his 1960 pamphlet, Robert Graves, by praising it as Graves’s ‘most accomplished poem written between 1923 and 1926’.[11] Critical opinion has generally recognized ‘Alice’ as a notable though minor poem. Nearly every book-length study of Graves’s poetry includes some discussion of it, with a near-unanimous agreement about its philosophical content.[12] Geoffrey Bullough seems to have been the first critic to broach the topic of relativism, writing in 1949 that Graves was ‘preoccupied with […] the relativity of knowledge’.[13] Adhering to Bullough, Cohen calls ‘Alice’ ‘a plea for relativism of judgement’.[14] He gives ample space to a discussion of Graves’s meter, and asserts relativism is imparted in ‘the irregular beat of the lines’ (p. 41). He notes that ‘For the first time, Graves brings the creative act into the argument’ (p. 42), viewing Alice’s chess victory as a poem.

Considering ‘Alice’ in a biographical framework, he emphasizes that Graves’s acceptance of ‘everyday reality’ protected him from his war-induced nightmarish fears, and that hereafter, ‘a visit to the other side will be “queer but true”’ (p. 42). He concludes with a quick comparison of the 1925 version of ‘Alice’ and the later 1938 recension as it appeared in Graves’s 1959 Collected Poems,[15] favouring the former. He reads ‘Alice’ alongside poems concerned with ‘reversed significances’, ‘The Terraced Valley’ and ‘Lost Acres’.

Douglas Day echoes some of the older critic’s opinions, reading into it references to the conscious and unconscious,[16] while contrasting ‘Alice’ with ‘The Cool Web’.[17]

We must choose, then, between a life of half-tones and a life of madness; our reason cannot cope with the force of existence unless that force is dissipated through a web of abstract, opaque verbiage. There is no suggestion here [in ‘The Cool Web’], as there was in ‘Alice’, that it is possible — especially for the true poet — to survive in a world of unreason. (p. 96)

He describes ‘Alice’ as ‘indeed another lesson in relativism and the inapplicability of reason and logic to certain important areas of experience’ (p. 85). By ‘another’, he is referring to Graves’s essay ‘What is Bad Poetry?’ discussed earlier in his book where he concludes that Graves held ‘a highly relativistic view of poetic creation’, which ‘corresponds to the philosophic relativism he had preached in Mockbeggar [sic] Hall the year before’ (p. 72).[18] .

Like Cohen, he treats ‘queer but true’ glancingly: ‘The other world will be “queer,” but it will be true to its own rules.’ By ‘true’ he means ‘faithful’,[19] asserting that the intent of ‘Alice’ is to stage Graves’s newfound confidence that he need not be intimidated by ‘the other world’ or the ‘strange world beyond the glass’ (p. 86). Although published two years after Cohen, Day’s study is sometimes referenced as the first book on Graves’s poetry, perhaps because it appeared under the imprint of the University of North Carolina Press, a prestigious publisher of scholarly work.

Daniel Hoffman’s succinct discussion of ‘Alice’ deserves mention here, to observe what one might have assumed, namely that all critics did not read ‘Alice’ as relativistic. Hoffman assents in general to Cohen’s and Day’s interpretation that ‘Alice’ configures wartime experience in some sense, but of the philosophical element only says that ‘Alice, “that prime heroine of our nation,” can represent the English mind’s fascination with mind’.[20] 

Closing the sixties, Michael Kirkham (1969) acknowledges varieties of relativism though not all pertain to ‘Alice’.

But as early as 1921 the results of his studies in psychology, anthropology and the history of religion were being felt in his writing; in the phase that ensued he set himself to work out in his verse an attitude of (then fashionable) ethical relativism, while in his criticism he outlined a parallel scheme of extreme aesthetic relativism.[21] 

‘Alice’, he argues, presents relativism with ‘with a gay insouciance which belies [the poem’s] seriousness’.[22] Kirkham considers ‘Alice’ more closely and more harshly than previous critics, beginning with l. 27–30:

As queer but true — not only in the main

True, but as true as anything you’d swear to,

Not worse or better than the life we are heir to.

He understands this passage to be saying ‘prose and poetic thought, reason and unreason are of equal validity, neither superior nor inferior to each other but different’ (p. 88). His argument for relativism modulates into a critique of ‘Alice’ as a childishly impolite mockery of prevailing bourgeois attitudes (p. 89). His essay ignores previous psychologically based readings.

Perhaps swayed by Kirkham’s efforts, Patrick J. Keene (1980) assents mildly to the relativist argument, though without using the ‘r’ word, saying only ‘Alice enjoys the best of both partial but equally valid worlds’.[23]

That same year, writing in The English Author’s Series of the Twayne Publications (which typically are designed as reference works for high school or college), Robert H. Canary remarks on the similarity between Alice and the ghost-woman in ‘The Pier-Glass’ and their mutual association with mirrors. Canary finds a meaningful contrast in the ghost-woman’s confinement in the bleak mansion and Alice’s freedom of movement, speculating that ‘Alice’ is Graves celebrating his triumph over PTSD, which allows him to ‘live in both the everyday world and the world beyond the glass’.[24] His view on the psychological dimension of the poem rehearses those shared by Cohen and Day.

The last study to appear in the 1980s, and in many ways the most discerning, was D. N. G. Carter’s Robert Graves: The Lasting Poetic Achievement (1989). Analysing ‘Alice’s’ first twelve lines, he concludes that ‘Alice’ provides ‘epistemology in a mock-solemn vein’;[25] he then reads the adversative coordination ‘queer but true’ to mean ‘one way of looking at reality does not automatically preclude another’ (p. 146). He notes that in his description of ‘that chance-discovered land’ (l. 34) Graves ‘proclaims’ his own concerns by differing from Lewis Caroll’s description. He notes approvingly Graves’s co-identification of the artist and the child:

The child’s world is also the artist in the sense that in their apprehension of the world neither recognises as invincible the authority of ‘formal logic’, the unities of time and space, the sobriety of the utilitarian or the empiricist. (p. 147)

Lastly, Carter observes ‘Alice’s’ influence claiming that in ‘The Cool Web’, ‘Graves is ‘beginning to apply the light-hearted perceptions of “Alice” in earnest’ (p. 147).

Patrick Quinn discusses ‘Alice’ in The Great War and the Missing Muse (1994) and in a reprint of chapter 4 from the book two years later in Focus on Robert Graves and His Contemporaries (1996).[26] His discussion of relativism is informed by Kirkham. He cites the same passage from ‘Alice’ (p. 114; Kirkham, p. 88) to support the relativist argument and for additional support, he excerpts a passage on relativism from The Long Week-End (1940) cited by Kirkham to describe what relativism signified for Graves at the time.

The word ‘relativity’ now came to be commonly used, out of the context of Einstein’s theory, to mean that a thing was only so if you cared to assume the hypothesis that made it so. Truth likewise was not absolute: ‘beautiful results’ could be obtained by mathematicians from consistent systems based on the hypothesis, for example, that one could slide a left hand into a rigid right-hand glove — or simultaneously into a pair of rigid right-hand gloves. [27]

Quinn maintains that ‘Alice’ tells us: ‘There are two distinct worlds: the one beyond the glass and the dull world of mid-Victorian routine and expectation. The true heroine is at home in both places and recognizes the relativity of truth in both places’ (p. 114). He develops earlier the psychological readings of Cohen and Day into a psychological schematic, asserting the drawing room (from which Alice enters the mirror) represents the conscious mind, and the mirror land or ‘the Palace of Looking Glass’ the unconscious. While his discussion of ‘Alice’ excludes consideration of Basanta Kumar Mallik’s influence, Mallik is mentioned extensively in the same chapter in conjunction with Graves’s ‘relativist attitudes’:

Under the influence of Mallik and his new philosophical direction, Graves became preoccupied with the contrariety manifested in human experience and with the need to find a synthesis. Sometimes these contradictions are resolved in familiar antimaterialist, antirationalist, and relativist attitudes. (p. 105)

Quinn extends a consideration of Graves’s relativism beyond ‘Alice’, crediting Laura Riding for both ‘destroying [Graves’s] relativistic standards’ (p. 131) and for ‘tightening and toughening’ his ‘relativistic notions’ (p. 275).

In his essay on Mallik, Michel Pharand (1998) notes ‘the relativity of truth’ in ‘Alice’,[28] which he believes Mallik influenced. In conceptualizing ‘The Palace of Looking Glass,’ he uses the misleading phrase, ‘the world beyond the looking glass.[29]

From time to time, researchers have made flyby comments about ‘Alice’. In a 1991 essay, Daniel Hoffman alludes to ‘Alice’ as one of several of Graves’s poems that would fit an anthology of poems ‘expressing post-traumatic stress syndrome a decade after the war’.[30] More recently (2014), Miriam Gamble passes a similar though more biting judgement calling ‘Alice’ a remnant of Graves’s disturbed psychology. Intensifying the Alice = Graves insight of Cohen and Keene, she writes: ‘Alice is a cypher for Graves’ and ‘her journey through the looking glass [is] a cypher for his journey to the trenches. All looking glasses lead to the trenches’.[31] That these somewhat casual remarks by serious researchers avoid relativism, suggests that by the nineties the relativist explanation may have lost relevance among critics. In his 2002 monograph, The Goddess Beckons: The Early Poetry of Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowki never mentions relativism once.

Contrariwise

While the relativistic view comports with Graves’s antirationalistic, anti-dogmatic statements, one doesn’t entail the other. Antirationalism without relativism finds earlier support in Romantic aesthetics, such as in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria,[32] and suggests that ‘Alice’, in positing the existence of an absolute truthbeyond any subjective perspective and expressible by poetry, is influenced to some extent by Coleridge and corresponds to Romantic notions of both aesthetics and epistemology. Carter posits that ‘Alice’ is one of the first of Graves’s poems to elevate the poetic power of intuition. I think we can see anticipatory shadows of it in other mirror-centred poems in The Pier-Glass (1921), for example in ‘The Magical Picture’, the sixth poem in The Pier-Glass, where perceptions are baked within subjectivity, rationality roughly shouldered aside, and access to truth recentred in the dialogic relationship between poem and reader. In ‘The Rainbow and the Sceptic’ (1924), the final poem in Mock Beggar Hall, published a year before Welchman’s Hose and a year after he penned ‘Alice’, Graves writes, ‘since laws move in rainbow-light | Let faith be therefore strong.’[33] Since ‘laws’ prove mutable, we should believe in something comparable to Parmenides’ unique, imperishable, Being, which Graves’s evokes as:

Neither eternal nor time-bound,

Not certain, nor in change,

Uncancelled by the cosmic round,

Nor crushed with its range.[34]

The underlying idea of the coincidence of opposites echoes Heraclitus’s famous fragment, ‘What is opposed brings together; the finest harmony comes from things at variance.’ Again, reason is flouted, and poetic intuition privileged as the mode of access to truth. Day’s accusation of ‘preaching’ notwithstanding, Graves’s commitment to an objective and lasting truth that may exist beyond mutable appearances — the ‘laws’ that constitute shifting frameworks and unstable perspectives — seems wholehearted. This stance cannot be called ‘relativism’.

One of Graves’s strategies in ‘Alice’ is to ply intertexts that feature the poetic imagination. Lewis Carroll’s Alice is of course the most prominent intertext. But, as Carter points out, Graves is reimagining Carroll (much as he would reimagine Dickens (David Copperfield) and Suetonius (Claudius). Rather than adopting his phrase ‘Looking Glass House’ or ‘Looking Glass World’, Graves invents ‘Palace of Looking Glass’ (l. 3–4). The intertext ‘Palace’ calls attention to The Garland of Laurel (1523) by John Skelton,[35] whom Graves pointedly references on the dedication leaf as the source of the comic title, Welchman’s Hose. Skelton’s ‘rich palace of the Queen of Fame’ symbolizes the power of poetry to grant immortality. Skelton’s lavish description of it, with palace gates, | Enlozenged with many goodly plates | Of gold’, and ‘chambers | envaulted with rubies’, imagines the materiality of the poem as a dimension of the Palace (pp. 362–63). Skelton, channeled by Graves, asserts that the ‘Palace of Looking Glass’ in ‘Alice’ is poetry, or aletheia, the ‘way of Truth’, and the poem before us the vaulted construction within which we gather.

Criticisms: 1960–1970

I believe J. M. Cohen’s observation that ‘for the first time, Graves brings the creative act into the argument’ (p. 42) is important, and naturally I concur with his high opinion of ‘Alice’ and marvel at the precision of his parameters (1923 and 1926); but I view his critique overall as oddly founded on a narrow, asymmetrical, reading that overemphasizes the psychological implications of ‘Alice’ at the expense of the philosophical. His analysis of the relativist aspects of the poem are impressionistic, lacking in scholarly precision. Cohen’s use of ‘relativism’ seems to reflect the 1960’s fashion of reducing it to a bundle term for categorizing related counter-cultural concerns such as questioning of authority, individualism, and cultural pluralism.

Explicating ‘queer but true’ from a biographical perspective, he pries it out of its place in the poem: ‘The fears which had for so long haunted this other world for him are now dispelled’ (p. 42) he writes; ‘a visit to the other side will be ”queer but true” . The word ‘visit’ is jarring. There is no indication that Alice (or Graves) treats The Palace of Looking Glass so familiarly and condescendingly. Cohen is the first critic to interpret Alice as a surrogate of Graves — a move that solves small problems while creating larger ones. Since Graves casts Alice as a near-mythic figure and introduces her as ‘the prime heroine of our nation’, which is antithetical to the self-image he creates in other poems, the correlation is necessarily false. By assuming that Graves was representing himself in Alice, rather than invoking a paradigm in the guise of a romantic heroine comparable to Lucius or Gargantua (though with the poetic imagination of Apuleius) Cohen accidentally shears off a crucial dimension of the poem.

Cohen’s comparison between the 1925 version of ‘Alice’ and the 1938 recension (as it appeared in Graves’s 1959 Collected Poems),[36] is praiseworthy for being the one critical discussion to acknowledge the later text, though it focuses exclusively on the poem as an aesthetic object, ignoring substantive clues to its meaning. He complains that the ‘somewhat un-Carrollian substitution of “Where empty hearses turn about” for “Where formal logic also comes” […] breaks the Victorian illusion a little too brusquely’ (p. 42). He might be right in asserting that the modulation from fantasy to grim reality is abrupt, though whether it’s ‘too brusque’ is a matter of taste and expectation.

In replacing ‘formal logic’ with the dysphemistic metaphor ‘empty hearses’, the poem analogizes meaningless syllogisms with the cenotaphs and empty coffins used in burials of soldiers during and immediately after World War One. Philosophically, the revision proposes, absurdly, that if truth were wholly framework dependent, and no standpoint can adjudicate between frameworks, then ‘the [lingering] Victorian illusion’ embraced by the educated upper and middle classes in 1914 leading directly to the devastation of the war would be equal to the truth of those who warned against the war. Therefore, rather than criticizing it as ‘too brusque’, one might read the revision as a rejection of relativism for practical as well as moral reasons. Moreover, dismissing the revision buries the poem’s metapoetic alignment of contrasts: the Palace of Looking Glass / the drawing room; poetry / mundanity; truth and meaningfulness / death.[37]

Cohen neglects other changes as well, for example the disappearance of six lines of text in the later poem and its substitution at line 30 of ‘The usual dimensions you are heir to’ for ‘Not worse or better than the life we are heir to’. Repeating ‘you’ in both lines of the couplet shifts the address from a general ‘you’ to a very specific targeted ‘you’, thereby introducing a new opposition between ‘you’ and a distinct though nonspecific ‘me’ or ‘us’. The passage is no longer speaking of a boundary situation we all share but implicating an unlucky (possibly self-selected) group as ‘heirs’ to the commonplace — doomed, as were their benefactors, to what Alice takes for the ‘dullness’ of Victorian routine (though which ‘Alice’ tells us entails nihilism). While Cohen may be mostly correct in saying the emendations to the text don’t substantively change the argument, they nonetheless threaten his interpretation.

As much as I enjoyed Cohen’s engagement with the poem’s prosody, I found his conclusions bordering on trivial. ‘The relativism of the poem’s thought is echoed in the irregular beat of the lines’ (p. 41) seems true only if one assumes it to be true. That is, it’s true within the framework of Cohen’s analysis, but ultimately not convincing or true.

Douglas Day entertains both of Cohen’s main ideas. With respect to relativism, he seems to echo Cohen’s ‘plea for relativity’ (my emphasis) with ‘another lesson is relativity’ (again) (p. 85), adding perhaps a note of ruefulness. In his critique, Day claims ‘Graves is led to a highly relativistic view of poetic creation, which corresponds to the philosophical relativism he had preached in Mockbegger [sic] Hall the year before’ (p. 72).

The term ‘philosophical relativism’ was an all-encompassing term that might translate as general scepticism of universal value systems. However, Day’s discussion of ‘What is Bad Poetry?’ suggests what is under threat is the universality of aesthetic standards, or what Graves is proposing in the essay is aesthetic relativism: the anti-Romantic position that aesthetic judgements are relative to individuals, cultures, historical periods, or conceptual frameworks, and that no universal standard of beauty or artistic value exists. There are indeed sentences on every page of Graves’s essay that could be taken as proof of a belief in aesthetic relativism.

There is a good and a bad from the reader’s point of view […], the good is what is in harmony with his needs at the moment and the bad is what is in opposition to these needs or has no bearing on them. (p. 43)

A truly universal poem in spite of Tolstoi’s dictum would be impossible, differences of environment having set such bounds between the customs of different races and colours, that even such simple symbols as we have in common with the Hindus are unintelligible to Congo pigmy and Eskimo. (p. 36)

Every poem, I repeat, can only be fairly judged in its own context; it is the poet’s business to write the poem before it ever becomes the reader’s to enjoy or dislike it. (p. 29)

It seems then that the goodness of a poem is, for the reader, a relative quantity’. (p. 25)

But, having written all of that, toward the end of ‘What is Bad Poetry?’ Graves slips in a conundrum wrapped in faux-innocence. University professors who acknowledge that an absolutist standard is impossible nevertheless still assign textbooks written from an absolutist viewpoint — teaching that a poem can be judged as good or bad on its own merits — and strip points from papers that make absolutist declarations based on personal preferences. I think his point is not that Oxford professors are hypocritical or hidebound, or that while we know absolutist standards don’t exist, we proceed blindly as if they do, thereby endowing them with a certain notional reality. Read in the light of Graves’s deeper feelings for poetry, which the title of his book, Poetic Unreason, underscores, the point is that there exists a gap (something like dark energy or dark matter) between what we can prove or know logically and the free operations of the human mind. The rational exile of the Absolute does not erase the longing for it. He concludes the essay:

Perfect adaptability to any context, irresistible omnivorousness of reading, bringing with them universal toleration and omniscience, […] are magnificent counsels of perfection. The simile is only against the professors that when demanding these standards they yet uphold the sedate but absolutist textbooks of a scholarly criticism against the temperamental but absolutist essays of their pupils. Lord have mercy on us all, publicans and Pharisees alike! (p. 48).

I suggest that the essay only appears to endorse relativism, while in its closing paragraphs it abruptly turns against that commitment, and leaves the question “What is bad poetry?” deliberately aporetic.There may be no absolute standard of beauty or truth — but we cannot know it.[38]

Of course, the opinion expressed in ‘What is Bad Poetry?’, whatever it is, need not agree with the insights we find in ‘Alice’. It is plausible that the equivocation expressed in his 1921 essay, and challenged in later essays in Poetic Unreason, nourishes the satire of 1923 — that ‘Alice’ arises from that aporia. And it is plausible as well that the savagery of his attack on relativists in ‘Alice’ is directed, in part, as a caution to himself. [39]

Another of Day’s ideas about relativism seems to derive in part from Bullough, whose statement about ‘relativity of knowledge’ is quoted on p. 55. ‘Relativity of knowledge’ was an earlier term for epistemological or epistemic relativism, a position that what counts as knowledge depends on a framework rather than being universal (a position one sees in the work of Stanley Fish, for example).[40] It is Day’s contention that different frameworks —‘The Palace of Looking Glass’ and the ‘Dull round of mid-Victorian routine’ — reveal different facts, which, however contradictory, would be equally sound since there is no third framework with authority to adjudicate on the other two.

Relativity of knowledge in Day’s reading complements his embrace of the second of Cohen’s conclusions, that ‘Alice’ is a statement about psychological healing. Alice speculates that what lies beyond the fireplace must be different from her home.

Asking herself: ‘Suppose I stood behind

And viewed the fireplace of Their drawing-room

From hearthrug level, why must I assume10

That what I’d see would need to correspond

With what I now see? And the rooms beyond?

Why should they pair with our rooms?’

Day considers Alice a heroine because she journeys into uncertainty and returns, and that Graves’s intention is to demonstrate that her survival reveals ‘the world on the other side of the Looking Glass’ is circumscribed by rules.

We can infer from ‘Alice’ that the poet need not fear [unreason] as a limitless realm which must encroach on the boundaries of everyday reality. The world on the other side of the Looking Glass, if it is not controlled by Victorian logic, nevertheless is not chaotic or frightening; it has its own rules, and the poet may enter and leave it at will. (p. 87)

I find the emotional drama in Day’s interpretation at variance to the text. ‘Alice’ makes no reference to ‘fear’ or ‘chaos’, and Day does not specify the lines that suggest such. It may be that ‘chessboard personages, white and red, | Involved in never-ending tournament’ (l. 4–5) strike him as nightmarish;[41] however while the ‘personages’ do symbolize conflict of some kind or kinds, they also provide beauty and pleasure as in the poem’s lyric digression (l. 38–43) they are transformed into ‘The red-and-white-flower-spangled hedge’ (l. 41). Neither does the poem raise the issue of whether ‘The Palace of Looking Glass’ will ‘encroach on the boundaries of everyday reality’. However, in the term ‘chance-discovered land’ there is a sense of boundlessness the poem appears to cherish.

With the conceit ‘Victorian logic’ Day artfully weaves together the poem’s ‘formal logic’ and ‘Victorian routine’, but occludes the word ‘routine’, even though both ‘logic’ and ‘routine’ are aspects of the modality of consciousness at which the poem is scoffing. ‘Routine’ crucially marks everyday life as commonplace and boring. ‘Victorian routine’ lacks the very impetus for Alice to immerse herself in ‘The Palace of Looking Glass’. Day is similarly casual in other descriptions. For example, Graves is delightfully evasive about where Alice is, or what constitutes the poem’s spatial ontology.

When that prime heroine of our nation, Alice,

Climbing courageously in through the Palace

Of Looking Glass, found it inhabited

By chessboard personages, white and red,

‘Alice’ never makes quite clear whether Alice remains in the Palace, as the term ‘palace’ might lead one to believe, or whether she climbs ‘through’ it to somewhere else. While she speculates about a drawing room with a fireplace (l. 9), the ‘chance discovered land’ (l. 34) conjures up yet another space, something wilder and more exciting — ‘queer’. The liminality or lack of clarity creates a phantasmagorical effect, intimating that Alice has entered a state of mind (something like a poetic trance) where objective differences are protean, similar to the world the original Alice enters in the hypotext. Day’s inattentiveness to Graves’s enigmatic inscrutability on the question of place is general among Graves’s critics. A lesser point specific to Day involves the informality of his terminology. Alice does not find ‘The Palace of Looking Glass’ ‘strange’, at least in the sense of the word prevalent in the 1920s (‘foreign’, ‘dangerous’); she finds it ‘queer’: ‘eccentric’, ‘not quite right’ (even ‘mischievously deceptive’, as Graves is being). And his use of real or ‘real’ in describing ‘the “real” world of Victorian England’ begs the larger metaphysical question the poem is raising. ‘Victoria’s golden rule’, and the ‘Dull round of mid-Victorian routine’ are not elegant variations on ‘the “real” world of Victorian England’; they are essential nuggets of hermeneutic ore, and an accomplished critic and scholar should not disregard their presence and purpose. Day appears equally negligent when he calls Welchman’s Hose a text concerned with ‘philosophical and psychological problems’ (p. 85), which implies the volume represents a treatise or a way of solving, exorcising, or remedying certain philosophical or psychological (personal or general) issues. In fact, the volume has a decidedly miscellaneous character, and includes memorable love poems, such as ‘Presence’, ‘Vanity’ and ‘Love Without Hope’, and a whimsical curse poem, ‘Traveler’s Curse After Misdirection’. Even ‘Alice’, with its metaphysical character is not about a philosophical problem. Like Cohen, Day appears to be squeezing ‘Alice’ into a coherent overarching biographical narrative that has war trauma and therapy playing a dominant role during the period Graves composed ‘Alice’ and insisting that Graves adopted relativism (or poetic banality) to speed his recovery.[42]

At the end of the sixties, in his remarkable book, The Poetry of Robert Graves, published by Oxford University Press, Michael Kirkham takes the soi disant relativist aspects of ‘Alice’ on their own terms, abandoning the therapeutic justification.[43] His handling of relativism is more informed than his predecessors, classifying types of relativism in Graves’s work and positing the claim that relativism is a substantive element of the poem.

But as early as 1921 the results of his studies in psychology, anthropology and the history of religion were being felt in his writing; in the phase that ensued he set himself to work out in his verse an attitude of (then fashionable) ethical relativism, while in his criticism he outlined a parallel scheme of extreme aesthetic relativism. This attitude ran counter to his deepest instincts and was poetically unfruitful. It lingered as a flavour in the early volumes of his second period, but the bitterness of these poems was in marked contrast with the studied neutrality of those that had preceded them and was a sign, rather, of his discontent with life lived in a moral vacuum. (p. 8)

His comment on Graves’s ‘extreme aesthetic relativism’ seems a response to ‘What is Bad Poetry?’ and it agrees with Day, whom Kirkham credits generously throughout his study. His comment that ethical relativism was ‘then fashionable’ is an accidental reminder of the general use to which the term ‘relativism’ was put in Kirkham’s own period. He helpfully observes that Graves’s work was ‘steadily becoming more popular and the tone of his writing shows greater self-assurance’ as well as ‘a consistent world-view and absolute moral standards’ (which would be termed ethical realism, though Kirkham may have thought it strategic not to overtly contradict himself in the space of a single paragraph). He ends the paragraph by affirming that the worldview and ‘standards’ embodied in The White Goddess were ‘essentially the same’ ones he had earlier, which might imply that Kirkham believes Graves’s relativistic notions never really mattered. His analysis of ‘Alice’ begins more than halfway through the poem:

As queer but true — not only in the main

True, but as true as anything you’d swear to,

Not worse or better than the life we are heir to.

He interprets this passage with great panache to mean that ‘Like man and woman, the worlds of waking and dream, prose and poetic thought, reason and unreason are of equal validity, neither superior nor inferior to each other but different’ (p. 88). Strictly speaking, the passage from ‘Alice’ makes no claims about ‘man and woman’ or ‘prose and poetic thought’ having ‘equal validity’. And what Kirkham means by ‘equal validity’ is unclear. If he means that the ‘worlds of’ Victorian routine and ‘The Palace of Looking Glass’, prose and poetry, are equally legitimate sources of truth, I would say again that the critic is reading this meaning into the text. Not only does Graves not make this assertion,[44] but typically, he regards poetry and prose as manifestly unequal (as, in fact, he seems to regard woman and man). Kirkham seems to want to conjure up a new version of Robert Graves at loggerheads with the archival version, or to offer oblique criticisms of Graves’s well-known positions on women and poetry. In the process he imposes a radical interpretive framework on the text.

While the oft-discussed passage above appears to express a subjectivist view (a limiting case of relativism), the operative phrase — ‘as true as anything you’d swear to’ — entirely lacks rigor, eliciting scepticism. Graves marks its inadequacy with the second of his Skelton intertexts, taken from the opening to The Doughty Duke of Albany:

Reioyse, Englande,

And understande

These tidings new,

Which be as trewe

As the gospel.[45]

The intertext warns us against reading the line as a subjectivist proposition simpliciter. Being embedded in a Skeltonic echo changes its meaning through a tonal shift. The heartiness of Skelton’s affirmative, credentialing verse makes Graves’s phrase sound weak, platitudinous — unGravesian — compelling us to regard the subjectivist proposition as unconvincing. The rhetorical force of the intertext leads us to accept that abandoning the transcendent as the standard of truth for personal judgement (or ‘anything you’d swear to’) is absurd; and so any belief that depends on it is untenable. That the intertext is specifically Skelton’s, Graves’s poet par excellence,[46] and that it is in fact verse, lends his argument additional strength. Poetry performs the epistemological claim; one might say through Graves, or, though it violates philosophy in the strictest sense, the poetic tradition rejects the proposition facetiously advanced by the poem and thus it represents the possibility of transcendent truth, formally enacting the movement by which a reader is brought from a contextual assessment (‘anything’) or the absurd, toward that truth, the Absolute. My argument is Graves raises the notion of relativism in ‘Alice’ mischievously, to belittle it, and profoundly, to preserve his disagreement with it.

The 1938 revision of line 30 epitomizes Graves’s attitude toward ‘anything goes’ epistemology. As touched on above, Graves replaces the downhearted ‘Not worse or better than the life we are heir to’ with ‘The usual three dimensions you are heir to’. The introduction of ‘dimensions’ imparts a sense of mortal limitations, both physical and temporal, reinforcing the sense of mortality in the phrase ‘you are heir to’. The line merely suggests that The Palace of Looking Glass is as legitimate a source of truth as the limited world to which ‘you’ (his interlocutors) are accustomed, having acquired it through the demise of its previous occupants. But it actually posits a weaker claim: that The Palace of Looking Glass exists, just as the drawing room exists. Both modalities of consciousness — Being and illusion — are true ‘in accordance with fact’ OED ‘True’ II.4.1a). But the qualifier ‘usual’ locks ‘anything’ into the dispiritingly quotidian realm, subverting the proposition of alethic equality. We might examine the connotations of ‘dimensions’ to consider that in referencing features of the physical world, Graves is indicating geometric structures with angles, a synecdoche for drawing room architecture. The physicality of the drawing room aligns additional contrasts: the physical / the imaginary; appearance / truth. During his last productive decade, almost fifty years after ‘Alice’, Graves revisited this contrast in ‘Those Blind from Birth’:

Those blind from birth ignore the false perspective

Of those who see. Their inward-gazing eyes

Broaden or narrow no right-angle;

Nor does a far-off mansion fade for them

To match-box size.[47]

The simile (perhaps with a wistful sense that poetic inspiration or ‘The Palace of Glass’ is shrinking from view) returns to the same nonrelativistic idea: a rational interpretation of experience conceals truth, whereas poetry reveals it. Poetry surpasses the ‘usual three dimensions’, the relativistic framework, in the same way that Homer surpasses history and mythopoeia surpasses mutability.

Kirkham next quotes lines 34–44, as putative evidence ‘Alice’ is presenting us with two equal modalities of Being.

[That] neither did this chance-discovered land

Make nohow or contrariwise the clean35

Dull round of mid-Victorian routine,

Nor did Victoria’s golden rule extend

Beyond the glass: it came to the dead end

Where formal logic also comes; thereafter

Begins that lubberland of dream and laughter,

The red-and-white-flower-spangled hedge, the grass

Where Apuleius pastured his Gold Ass,

For his discussion, Kirkham divides the passage at the word ‘thereafter’. In his interpretation of the first part of this passage, he skips over the yawn of boredom in ‘clean | Dull round of mid-Victorian routine’, the sarcasm of ‘golden’, and the sudden darkening of ‘it came to the dead end | Where formal logic also comes’. He overlooks that Alice finds home life unfulfilling and inferior to The Palace of Looking Glass (no more so than the reader). He also refrains from pondering the replacement on l. 39 of ‘formal logic’ with ‘Where empty hearses turn about’, avoiding the moral argument against relativism. It seems obvious that the emended passage, which declares that poetry is of vital importance, and that truth or the poetic imagination is imperative for national survival (adding meaning to the phrase ‘nation’s heroine’) ‘clarifies the thought’ of ‘Alice’ without ‘deviating from the spirit of the original’, Kirkham’s litmus test for whether to discuss revisions.

At this point in his analysis, Kirkham seemingly loses sympathy for the poem. Confronted by lubberland, he accuses ‘Alice’ of ‘betray[ing] a preference for the intuitive truth of the unconscious mind to the rational truth of the conscious mind’ (p. 88) — blaming the poem for wandering away from his criticism of it. He maintains, ‘The relativist position, in fact, is argued with a gay insouciance which belies its apparent seriousness’, but then he seems to abandon the relativist argument. He declares Graves’s real purpose is to mock ‘his dull, pedestrian, logical readers and the “normal” way of looking at things’ (p. 88). I agree that ‘Alice’ is ‘light-hearted’ — though the 1938 ‘Alice’ is less so — and that it is a satire. Rather than an argument for ‘the relativist position’, a more accurate summary would be, ‘Alice’ is a satire of relativism and a necessary corollary to Graves’s core conviction that truth enjoys ontological primacy and finds its fullest manifestation as poetry.

The poem’s performative frivolousness, that is, the rebellious, refractory plasticity of its language, its seemingly capricious lyric digression and torqued, nonsensical, conclusion, along with its heterogeneous intertextuality (drawing texts from a controversial Tudor poet, a nineteenth-century children’s author, a second century Roman author, and a sixteenth century scholar / physician articulates rather than obscures its convictions. And far from betraying Graves’s purpose, the passage serves it with impeccable logic by exhibiting poetic virtues — its ancient and modern literary affiliations, its capacity for self-renewal, its lubberlandish, frame-free independence.

The lyric digression muses on Alice’s literary antecedents with Carrollian nostalgia possessing a mythic overtone. Where lines 1–2 bring us into, lines 39–40 take us out of. Though moving in contrary directions (or directions that in the drawing room would seem contrary), each models mythic return: Alice returns to the hypotext, the idealized realm of poetry and to Skelton’s Palace, as the narrative focus returns to the paradisiacal ease, pleasure and perversity of lubberland. Drawing away from Alice to contemplate Lucius and Gargantua shifts attention from the poem’s relationship to philosophy to its relationship to a vast literary tradition. The references function exactly as Skelton’s ‘enlozenged plates’ and ‘envault[ing] rubies’ do, celebrating the materiality of the poem. The distich that follows Kirkham’s excerpt (l. 43–44), ‘Where young Gargantua made whole holiday; | But further from our heroine not to stray’ (my emphasis), demonstrates the freedom of form, miming the gap between modalities as well as poetry’s ability to straddle it. The B line surrenders the pastoral vision, simulating a regretful reconvening of the norm, the routine narrative — where an audience (presumably people like ‘you’, i.e. us) impatiently wait.

The entire passage (l. 39–43) contrasts the stolid, depersonalized drawing room (an ellipsis for ‘withdrawing room’), and the living poetic imagination — such stray thoughts that casually reactualize myth. It also concatenates other antitheses: domestic withdrawal / idealized nature; stultifying boredom / stimulating laughter; mortality / myth, demolishing the grounds for arguing an equality of beliefs, the relativist notion at the heart of Kirkham’s analysis.

Kirkham’s somewhat iconotropic conclusion brings a premature and, in my view, erratic closure to the study:

Making Alice the focus of the poem’s argument is the central impudence. Her unquestionably pragmatic approach to life gives Graves the excuse for blandly assuming as typically British attitudes which would be unacceptable to the ordinary member of the British public. He baits the reader with the monstrous claims that he makes for Alice’s intellect — that she was, for instance, an earlier Einstein and the possessor of a ‘philosophic bent’ — and he uses her gay confident tone and her childlike earnestness (‘queer but true ... as true as anything you’d swear to’) to parody logic and solemn formality. The same humour lights up the mock-logical ‘nohow or contrariwise’; it is a succinct way of saying ‘neither unreal, non-existent, nor an opposite reality’, but its oddity is that it suggests the language of the nursery: it has the brisk dismissive effect of a child’s reasoning. (p. 89)

The ‘monstrous claim’ and ‘brisk’ dismissive effect are likely covert intertexts from the same chapter of Through the Looking Glass referenced on line 35. Refraining from acknowledging Graves’s intertext while mimicking it in a way that few readers will understand it is incomprehensible, and attributing ‘intellect’ to Alice seems querulous. Graves construes Alice’s trademark curiosity not as ‘intellect’ but as poetic intuition making it the centrepiece of his imaginative transformation of the hypotext. Alice’s actions, i.e., how she interprets her adventures ‘when safe returned’ (l. 7) are reasonable in a way that reflects the hyper-rationality of the hypotext, yet, considering Alice’s difference from the ‘scientist’ (l. 49), its anti-intellectuality as well. Her conclusions propel the poem toward poetic nonsense — the poem’s final five impenetrable or at least bewildering lines that reflect Carroll’s metalogical concern with language.

Alice’s conclusions, mediated by a comic deadpan style, tell us that she fully understands that poetry does not banish ‘Victoria’s golden rule’ from existence; nor does it dismiss what Day terms ‘the “real” world’ as a reflection or an illusion. The passage quietly — so quietly that few seem to have noticed — inverts the normative relationship of object and reflection, asserting that poetry occupies a privileged ontological position — a position surpassing Carroll’s vision but bearing echoes of his paradoxical logic: Poetry is the really real world. The usual / routine / logic / anything is contingent. Both exist and have Being in that respect; but one is the way to Truth (Aletheia) and the other but empirical fact.

Were Graves to be using ‘nohow’ and ‘contrariwise’ to create ‘the brisk dismissive effect of a child’s reasoning’,[48] or simply to suggest ‘the language of the nursery’, as Kirkham argues, he would be ventriloquizing Alice to point out children’s limitations. In that case, he would be denoting innocence or precocity, moving the Alice piece from the alethic/sacred/meaningful/poetic side of the chessboard to the relativistic/profane/logical/anything side. Alice, the ‘prime heroine’ of a nation of poets, is neither innocent nor ordinary. It is essential to the poem’s architecture to understand that Graves literally means Alice is the extraordinary. She is not just hanging at The Palace of Looking Glass; she is The Palace: the Palace’s generative force: the real toad in the imaginary garden.[49] Kirkham reasonably asserts that ‘Making Alice the focus of the poem’s argument is’ audacious (p. 87) but its audacity (comic impersonation notwithstanding) has a purpose different from the droll social satire suggested by Kirkham. The object of Graves’s attack is not ‘the British public’, but the metaphysics that bestows a false authority on insular, parochial prejudices. The characteristics Graves assigns to his exemplar — a fictitious character, a child, gendered female, from a children’s book — are heterodox and disruptive, effectively extending the range of symbolic functions Carroll’s Alice serves. And this gesture possesses both poetic impudence and semantic significance, which becomes clearer when we examine the passage’s mythic subtext in which Alice becomes a Creatrix and ‘Climbing courageously in through the Palace of Looking Glass’ (l. 2) represents cosmogony. Bringing the world into being, she realizes an archetype, which, she has ‘long foreshadowed’, since Alice’s cosmogony is an analeptic recovery. Therefore, Alice both creates the world and reactualizes its creation.[50]

Graves is hardly condescending to ‘child reasoning’; instead, he is refashioning a fairytale with satirical elements drawing on the architecture of myth. As we follow the intertexts ‘nohow’ and ‘contrariwise’ we can better appreciate that he is scorning a belief system that valorises, to quote Paul Feyerabend, , ‘anything goes’.[51]

While Kirkham identifies ‘nohow’ and ‘contrariwise’ as ‘mock-logical’, he signals he knows but, weirdly, doesn’t acknowledge he knows, they are logic-mocking intertexts from Through the Looking Glass, referenced seven lines earlier in ‘queer but true’. ‘Nohow’ and ‘contrariwise’ redouble the poem’s satirical force by presencing the original passage whose farcical dialogue models an understanding of relativism from a distance, just as Skelton’s sumptuous description of the Palace models our notion of poetry, while evoking poetry’s opposite: circular argument, sterile opposition, falsity.

I know what you’re thinking about,’ said Tweedledum: ‘but it isn’t so, nohow.’

‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.’

‘I was thinking,’ Alice said very politely, ‘which is the best way out of this wood: it’s getting so dark. Would you tell me, please?’

But the little men only looked at each other and grinned.

They looked so exactly like a couple of great schoolboys that Alice couldn’t help pointing her finger at Tweedledum, and saying ‘First Boy!’

‘Nohow!’ Tweedledum cried out briskly, and shut his mouth up again with a snap.

‘Next Boy!’ said Alice, passing on to Tweedledee, though she felt quite certain he would only shout out ‘Contrariwise!’ and so he did.[52]

In the hyptotext, Carroll is parodying the pretensions of formal reasoning. By stationing Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the periphery of his poem, Graves transposes Carroll into an epistemological register. He redeploys them to expose the pretensions of relativism — of assigning truth to context. One cannot suppose that whatever Tweedledum and Tweedledee swear to can be counted as truth in any meaningful discourse. In 1938, Graves will introduce ‘empty hearses’ as a sombre reductio to pair with their comical reductio; but here they remind us of the numinous possibilities that Graves found in texts published for children, the considerable pleasure he took in them, and, as Carter suggests, their value to researchers who want to understand him. It’s important to note that Carroll’s Alice refrains from arguing with the twins. She can only escape them, which Graves’s ‘Alice’ rehearses to perfection. Not deprecating ‘mid-Victorian routine’, she ‘climbs’ above the intellectual perpetuum mobile of disputation — just as he does by writing a poetic satire rather than, to quote Cohen, ‘a plea for relativism’. Poetry continues to stray; logical formulations, contrariwise.

Criticisms: 1970 to the Present

Kirkham influenced subsequent criticism, up to a point. Patrick Keene’s comment that ‘Alice enjoys the best of both partial but equally valid worlds’[53] (which is surprisingly mild for a text titled A Wild Civility) reveals Kirkham’s hand. One cannot imagine that, were he simply reading the poem, Keene would think Alice ‘enjoys’ the ‘world of logic’, much less ‘the world’ of ‘empty hearses’. The only ‘fun’ the poem mentions occurs in The Palace of Looking Glass.

D. N. G. Carter’s cautious observations set him apart from post-Kirkham relativists. His comment that ‘Alice’ provides ‘epistemology in a mock-solemn vein’ acknowledges the philosophic argument without succumbing to the relativist conclusions of the sixties. I largely agree with his reading of ‘queer but true’ as a statement that ‘one way of looking at reality does not automatically preclude another’, however I would substitute ‘actuality’ for the symbolically loaded ‘reality’. Graves handles the term ‘reality’ carefully, using it only once, ambiguosly, in the conceit ‘sole Reality’. The initial capital splits ‘reality’ in half: the implicit everyday real, or that which people take for the real, and the extraordinary, the really Real. He strikes ‘sole Reality’ from the poem in 1938, perhaps for the same reason he eliminates ‘philosophical’ (l. 6): for being too literal or overly didactic (Day’s sense of being lectured, perhaps).

We owe a debt of gratitude to Carter for his discussion of ‘the child’s world’, and his declaration of the importance of childhood in Graves studies. He reminds us that childhood is a pervasive element in Graves’s work:

His experience of childhood and children […] is continually with him, informing the perceptions of his poems, in some cases providing their furniture, not infrequently affecting their expression. (p. 145)

Carter identifies something more pivotal than ‘furniture’ or ‘expression’ to Graves’s view of poetry. As a child, Alice flouts the inadequacy of the frameworks conventionally thought indispensable to poetry’s meaningful apprehension. Her receptivity to the poetic or to truth’s disclosure through poetry is characteristically human. Because children are characteristically human. The child is not the source of poetic insight but the evidence that poetic insight is not the sole possession of any privileged interpretive community.

Writing five years after Carter, Patrick Quinn retrieves and extends the insights of the nineteen sixties, interpreting ‘Alice’ as a negotiation between the conscious mind and the unconscious that draws upon ‘a relativistic philosophy’ for balance (p. 113). Quinn’s arguments are well-informed and persuasively presented. He becomes the first critic to pinpoint ‘the relativity of truth’ as the relativism previous researchers had been theorizing. But he makes easily avoidable errors, too. His statements about Laura Riding’s impact on Graves’s relativist beliefs are vague and contradictory. The wording of his statement that ‘The true heroine recognizes the relativity of truth in both places’ (p. 114) is confused. He means that Alice recognizes that what is true in her drawing room is not true in The Palace of Looking Glass, and vice versa. But he is literally ascribing to her a metatheoretical understanding that truth is dependent on perspective, which he means to ascribe to Graves. Additionally, he mistakes the Graves / Hodge discussion of relativism in The Long Week-End for approval. He misreads the intent of Kirkham’s excerpt (Kirkham, p. 237), which merely glosses Graves / Hodge’s nonsensical, tongue-in-cheek definition of relativism (‘one could slide a left hand into a rigid right-hand glove — or simultaneously into a pair of rigid right-hand gloves’), and passes over Kirkham’s admission that the complete passage deprecates relativism and labels it ‘solipsistic’ (a charge that goes back to Plato’s critique of the Sophists).[54]

Quinn is a tireless and perceptive researcher and a wonderful writer; but nobody’s perfect. In his extensive research into Basanta Kumar Mallik’s influence (largely between 1922 and 1923, the period in which Graves wrote ‘Alice’)[55] he claims that Mallik led Graves to adopt aesthetic relativism.[56] Under the influence of Mallik, he writes, ‘Graves embraced the theory of relativity so firmly that in his Poetic Unreason, published in 1925, ‘he goes so far as to affirm that judgments of “good” poetry and “bad” poetry are relative to the experiences of the critic’ (p. 108). But Graves doesn’t ‘go as far’ as it might seem, as subsequent essays in his book prove. Within Poetic Unreason, ‘What is Bad Poetry?’ might only be playing the part of logic in the volume’s larger concern with the dialectical relationship between Classical and Romantic poetry as Graves conceives it (largely to favour Romantic poetry as genuine and Classical as performative and subservient — yet another symbolic opposition between truth and relativism).

Quinn acknowledges that Graves was ‘uncomfortable with the term [relativism]’, and Quinn himself seems at times uncomfortable as well. He posits that ‘relativism became a way of interpreting the world’ (p. 109). True enough, though the corollary, that relativism became Graves’s ‘way of interpreting the world’ conflates speculation with belief.

In his comments on ‘Alice’ and relativism, Michel Pharand, a stalwart supporter of Gravesiana and The Robert Graves Society in its early years, largely adopts Quinn’s perspective (even reproducing Quinn’s sentences), but with greater (and in my opinion, misplaced) conviction. Although Pharand gives only a passing thought to ‘Alice’ (quoting Quinn’s solecism) his primary focus is on Mallik, and he enters our discussion only because he insists that Graves and Mallik were both relativists, contra the opinions of the distinguished Mallik scholar Madhuri Sondhi, and Mary Walker, Mallik’s longtime friend and then the guardian of his legacy, published two years earlier in ‘Basanta Kumar Mallik and Robert Graves: Personal Encounters’.[57]

Although the title may suggest an exclusive focus on their friendship, ‘Basanta Kumar Mallik and Robert Graves’ encompasses penetrating insights into their respective beliefs, specifically deprecating relativism and exempting Graves and Mallik from the charge of holding relativist views. [58]

There is, to be sure, a widespread confusion of values, which is described by some post-modernists as ‘relativism’. Relativism, however, can easily become a source of non-value or a mask for a concealed absolutism. Relativism rests on the notion of equal and arbitrary assumed hypotheses on which differing and internally coherent systems can be constructed. It thus debunks all values or enables the shrugging off of values other than one’s own as also ‘relative’ and unworthy of attention. (Sondhi and Walker)

Sondhi and Walker also note that:

Both men believed in the possibility of certainty and truth which they could not find in the traditional absolutes. Neither despaired, but accepted the human condition of less-than-absolute belief, each in their separate ways and strove to record certainty as they found it. (Sondhi and Walker)

The phrase, ‘the possibility of certainty and [unqualified] truth’ brings us safely back to Graves and ‘Alice’. One might see ‘Alice’ as a setting for the interplay, not of conscious and unconscious forces (Quinn), but of opposing belief systems: on one hand, an epistemology that denies absolutes (or, as Graves writes in Good-Bye to All That, denies the possibility of a ‘poetry of constant value’), and on the other, a poetics of revelation that affirms it. Subtextual traps notwithstanding, ‘Alice’ doesn’t really argue that Poetry is superior to Relativism, but kicks over the table and declares, ex cathedra, Poetry is superior, warranting his declaration with appeals to a tradition the poem constitutes, referenced indirectly in Skelton, in Lewis Carroll, and in ‘The Rainbow and the Sceptic’.

Since Pharand and Quinn argue that Mock Beggar Hall promulgates relativist views Graves might have held at the time he wrote ‘Alice’, I’d like to end by returning briefly to ‘The Rainbow’ and the Sceptic, which allows for (if not demands) a non-relativistic faith in poetry.

Conclusion: Laws

So laws like rainbows move and mock,

So wisdom never brings30

The airy treasure to unlock

The essential heart of things.

[…]

Then since laws move in rainbow-light

Let faith be therefore strong,42

That change can never prove you right,

Nor either prove you wrong.

****

She was right.

An earlier Einstein whom the Laws of Light15

And Euclid’s beg-the-question fallacies

Could not convince: a master-mind was Alice’s.

In ‘The Rainbow and the Sceptic’, the word ‘laws’ appears in stanzas 1, 8, and 11 (8 and 11 quoted above). ‘Laws’ on line 15 of ‘Alice’ might well be deemed an autotext, a clue to suggest that as in ‘The Rainbow and the Sceptic’, Graves intends the argument in ‘Alice’ to be for the infinite, or for the fundamentality of truth, or ‘unreason’, configured as contradiction: that is to say, the drawing-room point of departure for Alice may be and still not be a drawing-room. And Alice, who has neither precisely gone through the looking glass nor precisely stayed inside it, remains standing in front of the drawing-room glass, gazing into it, and the ‘chance-discovered land’ or the ‘Palace of Looking Glass’ represents a Homeric vision of the poetic imagination (not the text per se but the reader’s fantasy / not the text per se or the reader’s fantasy).

With regard to Graves’s mindset in 1923: if he had committed himself to the relativistic position ‘Alice’s’ critics have assigned to him, he might have begun Welchman’s Hose with a poem celebrating pluralism or the equality of competing interpretations, perhaps asserting that interpretation authorizes truth. Instead, he wrote a poem celebrating the notion that truth authorizes interpretation, that it is singular yet combines contradictions, as Friedrich Schlegel put it, ‘All is One and One is All’;[59] or echoing Heraclitus’s famous fragment (mentioned by Eryximachus in The Symposium), ‘What is opposed brings together; the finest harmony comes from things at variance.’ And that transcendent truth is perceived as truth by the human mind across every boundary — universally (even by children) — and that poetry entails the possibility of truth. Finally, the absence of anything like truth (order, stability, fixity) in our worldly experience requires a ‘faith’ in a transcendent truth, in the intentional object of poetry, toward which Graves’s poetry will now become unswervingly oriented.

Acknowledgement: I presented a shorter version of this paper at the Seventeenth International Robert Graves Conference held in Palma, Mallorca, Spain, July 7–11, 2026. Thanks are due to Charles Mundye, Julian Bastida, and the other organizers of that conference, to William and Philip Graves for their Letters of Robert Graves online database, to Carl Hahn for his detailed revision of the Higginson/William bibliography, and to Joseph T. Thomas, Jr, for sharpening several parts of my argument.

Michael Joseph is the editor of The Robert Graves Review, one of two North American vice presidents of The Robert Graves Society, and the liaison of The Robert Graves Society to the Modern Language Association. He co-edited Heroines of the Postmodern and their Worlds in Contemporary Historical Fiction (Routledge, 2026) with Alicja Bemben.

NOTES