Abstract: Central to argument of The White Goddess is Graves’s distinction between poetic and rational modes of thought. His understanding of poetic thought and its integration of emotion and intuition corresponds closely to contemporary psychological ideas about right-hemispheric specialization in the brain. In Graves’s assessment, the triumph of Olympianism in ancient Greece made possible the domination of western culture by Socratic rationalism. Graves’s poetry and The White Goddess itself demonstrate the imaginative possibilities of poetic thought and its value as another way of understanding time and the world.

Keywords: mythology, psychology, poetry, consciousness, time

__

Commenting on Robert Graves’s more-or-less impossible arguments about early Welsh and Irish literature in The White Goddess, the medievalist Mary Ann Constantine observes that ‘We know — as he knew — that as scholarship it just will not do, but the opinionated, idiosyncratic voice is a challenge, a reminder of other ways of thinking, that we would perhaps do well to remember’.[1] Reading The White Goddess as ‘a reminder of other ways of thinking’ offers a perspective on the book that foregrounds an important strand in Graves’s critical writings, focused on the relationship between consciousness and poetry. Seen in this light, The White Goddess is less of a departure from his earlier criticism than it may at first appear, while laying the foundations for Graves’s subsequent work on mythography and his public lectures on poetry. In his 1925 study Poetic Unreason, for example, Graves devotes a chapter to ‘A Theory of Consciousness’, in which he argues that ‘The precise form the poem will take cannot be known until it has taken that form. Non-conscious experience can never be dictated to by a predicting consciousness’.[2] Graves also distinguishes between intellectual and emotional modes of cognition, both of which may contribute to the creation of a poem: ‘The emotional mode may find its images in intellectual abstractions as easily as the intellectual mode may form abstractions from emotional images’ (Poetic Unreason, p. 52). The shaping role of non-rational modes of cognition, and the integration of emotion and intellect through the act of poetic creation, are central to the arguments of The White Goddess.

In his foreword to the revised and expanded edition of The White Goddess, Graves distinguishes poetic thought from its opposite, the linear, rational mode of thought that has dominated western philosophy, science, and scholarship since classical times. Acknowledging the strangeness of the book, Graves cautions it is best ‘avoided by anyone with a tired, distracted, or rigidly scientific mind’.[3] Whatever one makes of Graves’s historical arguments, The White Goddess is a profound expression of the mythopoeic imagination and a tour de force of mythographic thinking, both of which he sees as having been displaced by scientific rationalism, the origins of which lie within the ancient Greek world. ‘One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology’, he writes, ‘was made by Socrates. Myths frightened or offended him; he preferred to turn his back on them and train his mind to think scientifically’ (White Goddess, p. 6). Citing Socrates’s dismissal of mythic creatures such as the Hippocentaur and Chimaera as absurdities in the Phaedrus, Graves argues that the philosopher’s rationalism left him only crudely naturalistic explanations for mythic figures and events (pp. 6-7). For Graves, Socrates’s rejection of myth entails rejecting the White Goddess herself: ‘Socrates, in turning his back on poetic myths, was really turning his back on the Moon-goddess who inspired them and who demanded that man should pay woman spiritual and sexual homage’ (p. 7). He regards it as poetic justice that Socrates consequently suffered ‘a shrew of a wife’ and infatuation with Alcibiades (‘the ruin of Athens’) before being poisoned with hemlock, sacred to Hecate, goddess of witchcraft (p. 8).

Socrates functions here as a symbol of the scientific rationalism that Graves challenges with poetry and myth as more meaningful ways of apprehending the world. He directly addresses this fundamental dichotomy in chapter thirteen, ‘Palamedes and the Cranes’, where Graves makes it central to his engagement with the mythographic argument of the book:

What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only means of transmitting useful knowledge. (p. 217)

Under the regime of prose, poetry becomes reduced to ‘music’ and ‘old-fashioned diction’ that ‘has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent’ (ibid). Ironically, losing the capacity for poetic thought entails a loss of clear thinking in prose as well: ‘from the inability to think poetically — to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense — derives the failure to think clearly in prose’ (ibid). This passage provides one of the clearest definitions of poetic thought in Graves’s writing, the aim of which is ‘a multiple sense’ produced through the recombination of the ‘original images and rhythms’ of speech. It is a non-linear process of composition, creating not a logical sequence of ideas, but an intuitively apprehended synchronicity of image, sound, and sense.

What Graves describes is recognizable today as a mode of cognition associated with the right hemisphere of the human brain, just as linear-sequential reasoning is associated with left. The psychologist Darcia Narváez observes that in a healthily functioning brain, the right hemisphere gathers and transmits our experiences ‘to the left hemisphere (LH), which unpacks and analyzes them to identify algorithms and generalize for predictions, and then sends those analyses back to the R[ight] H[emisphere] for intuitive assessment and integration into an experiential wholeness’.[4] Her description of this process in psychological terms matches Graves’s very closely, with the left hemisphere’s analysis and identification of algorithms corresponding to the resolution of speech into images and rhythms while the right hemisphere’s ‘intuitive assessment and integration into an experiential wholeness’ corresponds to the poet’s recombination of images and rhythms ‘on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense’. Just as Graves observes that a loss of this mode of thought entails a ‘failure to think clearly in prose,’ so Narváez points to the cognitive and emotional consequences of diminished right hemispheric functioning: ‘The common condition among those living within societies governed by the dominant worldview — feeling fragmented, devitalized, depersonalized, depressed, or dissociated, along with lost emotional depth and empathy — corresponds to an overbearing L[eft] H[emisphere] and underactive, often underdeveloped, R[ight] H[emisphere]’ (Narváez, p. 270). Narváez could be describing the intellectual and emotional climate of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — ‘I can connect | Nothing with nothing’ — but this loss of the ability to connect makes the sequencing of ideas necessary for prose all but impossible.[5]

My purpose in mapping Graves’s distinction between poetic and prosaic thought onto a contemporary account of the brain’s hemispheric specialization is to show that he is not merely projecting his subjective experience as a poet and prose writer, but describing in literary and mythological terms an empirically verifiable distinction in modes of cognition; cultures are themselves partly shaped by the extent to which one or other mode is valued and developed. In The White Goddess, Graves also frames his dichotomy in terms of truth versus fact: the poet’s ‘function is truth, whereas the scholar’s is fact. Fact is not to be gainsaid; one may put in this way, that fact is a Tribune of the People with no legislative right, but only the right of veto. Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth’ (p. 218). Reading this in 2026, one might only wish that fact was still ‘a Tribune of the People’, but framing the distinction in these terms has the advantage of positioning truth as a form of understanding or wisdom distinct from fact but not counterfactual; seen in this light, our so-called ‘post-truth world’ in which commentators and politicians spout ‘alternative facts’ in defiance of evidence is simply a world in which people lie with impunity. Poets are not liars. Commenting on St. Paul’s quotation of the Greek proverb, ‘All Cretans are liars’, in Titus 1:12, Graves writes that, ‘They were called liars for the same reason poets are: because they had a different way of looking at things’ (p. 234). This ‘different way of looking’ is holistic, relational, and imaginative, rather than linear, rational, and factual. The capacity to think poetically provides some immunity from the counterfactual; the Cretans were regarded as liars, Graves tells us, ‘because they remained unmoved by Olympian propaganda, which for the previous thousand years or so had insisted on an Eternal, Almighty, Just Father Zeus — Zeus who had swept away with his thunderbolt all the wicked old gods and established his throne forever on Mount Olympus’ (p. 234). Make Olympus great again! In response to such claims, the Cretans could simply point to Zeus’s tomb.

Olympianism, in Graves’s view, refined ‘a theory of political and moral expediency’ that led to the orthodoxy of opinion dominating both religion and the academy, where ‘one has to be very careful indeed not to get out of step with one’s colleagues and especially not to publish any heterodox theories’ (p. 235). If the modern university, for Graves, is dominated by a mixture of conformity and ruthless pragmatism, he imagines its opposite in the bardic schools of Ireland:

What fun they must have had in their forest colleges! And such restorations of their lore as can still be made from surviving records are more than quaint historical curiosities; they illustrate a method of thought which has not yet outlasted its usefulness, however grossly abused by mystical quacks of the intervening centuries. (p. 288)

The fun-loving bards in their woodland academy (not to mention Graves’s own ‘restorations of their lore’) may be closer to Romantic Celticism than historical reality, but the passage presents the poetic ‘method of thought’ as an alternative to the rationalism that Graves felt was fetishized by modern western culture, while acknowledging that it is a method that has been much abused.

To return to the title of this talk, what lessons does poetic thought have to offer? To attempt an answer, we might look at what Graves thinks poetic thought can do. Most obviously, it is the cognitive mode that enables the composition of poems and mythological understanding, but for Graves it is also an imaginative means of solving historical and textual problems, producing interpretations and reconstructions that are creatively liberating even if they cannot of their nature always meet the requirements of scholarship. As examples of ‘unreason’ as an effective means of discovery and problem-solving, Graves cites the examples of the flashes of insight that produced mathematician William Rowan Hamilton’s ‘quaternions’ and Clerk Maxwell’s ability to produce correct formulae without being able to work out the calculations that justified them (pp. 334-35). Poetic thought or unreason breaks us free not only of sequential thought, but of the linear experience of time itself, revealing ‘that time is not the stable moving staircase that prose-men have for centuries pretended it to be, but an unaccountable wibble-wobble’ (p. 334). As the Tenth Doctor played by David Tennant says in the 2007 episode of Doctor Who, ‘Blink,’ time is not ‘a strict progression of cause to effect,’ but ‘more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey stuff’.[6] It is this wibbly-wobbly aspect of time that enables the poet to experience the simultaneity of past, present, and future through the exercise of ‘unreason’: ‘In the poetic act, time is suspended, and details of future experience often become incorporated into the poem, as in dreams’ (White Goddess, p. 334). Graves distinguishes between ‘proleptic thought’ — an awareness of futurity — and ‘analeptic thought,’ ‘the recovery of lost events by the same suspension’ (ibid). As a mode of synchronic, holistic awareness, poetic thought produces an experience in which time is no longer perceived sequentially.

Graves addresses this phenomenon in several of his poems, most directly in ‘On Portents,’ a poem suggesting the mind — at least the mind of the Muse — has the power not simply to perceive time, but to shape it the pull of the Muse’s ‘bladed mind’ creates ‘tourbillions’ — whirlwinds — in the fabric of time itself, generating rumours that ‘the dead walk’ and that ‘futurity’ sheds ‘the unborn’.[7] Past and future haunt the present, as the linear, sequential experience of time yields to a synchronous state in which such distinctions are meaningless, or at least blurred. Such an ability to evade normal temporal succession also informs ‘The Fallen Tower of Siloam’, with its opening lines, ‘Should the building totter, run for an archway! | We were there already’ — the poets having the preternatural knowledge to seek shelter in advance of the building’s collapse (Graves, Collected Poems, p. 383).

In reminding us of ‘other ways of thinking’, The White Goddess teaches us that the rationalism of the dominant western worldview is not the only way of apprehending the world, and that accessing more holistic modes of understanding can reframe our perspectives in ways that empower creative responses while breaking down the rigid categories that structure our everyday experience — Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’.[8] Graves’s poetic thought may not offer an infallible method of historical or even mythographical inquiry, but it has the decided advantage of shaking us out of our customarily prosaic assumptions and opening up new, imaginative horizons for exploration.

Paul Robichaud is Professor of English at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut. His recent publications include Stories of the Stones: Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany (Reaktion, 2026) and Pan: the Great God’s Modern Return (Reaktion, 2021). He is currently writing on the supernatural ballads. ORCID 0000-0003-0393-6667

NOTES