Abstract: The panel ‘The Didactic Mr Graves’ presented at the 141st MLA Annual Convention, Toronto, 8–11 January 2026, co-organised by North American VPs for The Society, Anett Jessop and Michael Joseph, marked the Society’s third appearance since it gained Allied Organization status in January 2023 and the seventh MLA appearance spanning the years 2016–the present. Papers were presented by four North American scholars. The primary texts under discussion included works that have produced a large catalogue of critical studies, The White Goddess, and I, Claudius, and works that have attracted critical attention only recently, The Penny Fiddle, and Ann at Highwood Hall.

Keywords: children’s poetry, I, Claudius, The White Goddess, poetic thought, teaching

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Scholars presented four papers examining the presence of didacticism in the work of Robert Graves. While the suggested panel topic allowed room for commenting on moralizing or preachiness in Graves’s work, speakers focused on the more benign aspects and instances of instruction or education and how Graves has been adapted to the classroom.

In ‘Robert Graves at Highwood Hall Academy’, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. (San Diego State University) performed a virtuosic close reading of poems in the unjustly neglected Ann at Highwood Hall (1964). Thomas demonstrated that Graves’s dedication to poetic craft and principles extended to poems composed for or offered to children and elaborated on previous arguments that Graves’s primary impulse in these publications was to model poetic craft and meaning for young poets. His paper anticipated a study that he would later present at the Seventeenth International Robert Graves Conference in Mallorca. Reinforcing the connection between didacticism and poetry, in ‘The Penny Fiddle and the Turn to Modern British Children’s Literature’, Lissa Paul (Brock University) discussed her work as an editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005), for which she developed the children’s poetry section. In addition to individual poems in that capacious volume, Paul reprinted complete texts from nine poets spanning the period from the mid-nineteenth-century to the present day. She defended her surprising inclusion of The Penny Fiddle on historical and aesthetic grounds. She argued that Graves holds a significant place in the history of twentieth-century British children’s poetry for completing the transformation of poems for children into modern poetry, and for embodying in his work what children’s literary scholars call The Creative Child. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Paul confessed her preference for ‘the genteel tradition’ to children’s verse with greater commercial pretensions, defending her inclusion of poets like Graves, Ted Hughes, and Grace Nichols while excluding Eleanor Farjeon, Dr. Seuss and Jack Prelutzky.

In ‘Robert Graves and the Lessons of Poetic Thought’, Paul Robichaud (Albertus Magnus College) considered ideas Graves developed in The White Goddess about the cognitive integration of emotion and intuition, paralleling them to contemporary psychological theories about right-hemispheric specialization in the brain. He argues compellingly (and quite rationally) that The White Goddess  demonstrates possibilities for a non-rational apprehension of ‘time and the world’. Turning to another of Graves’s canonical texts, Beatriz Seelaender (University de São Paulo) re-contextualized the Claudius books as a teaching text in ‘The Claudius Duology as a Pleasurable History Lesson’. Emphasizing the didactic value of joy (delectando monemus), her paper examined the methodology by which Graves reshaped his sources to create ‘entertaining yet factually plausible narratives’. She contrasted Graves’s popular reconstructions, claiming ‘they likely surpassed Tacitus and Suetonius readership as a [modern] reader’s first contact with early imperial history’, to his ‘his ill-received’ fabrication of David Copperfield. In writing about the classical roots of Graves’s Claudius novels, Ms Seelaender joins the company of other young and mid-career scholars — both inside and outside the Gravesian universe — re-examining the influence of classical texts on Graves’s poetry and fiction, many of whom we have seen at our conferences and panels — Adriana Marinelli, Alicia Stallings, Alicja Bemben, Elena Theodorakopolous and Enrichetta Soccio, to name a few.

The panel was well-attended and attendees included members of an honor’s class from a TFS - Canada’s International School (formerly Toronto French School), led by Douglas Parker; a pleasing coincidence that a class of students should attend a panel focusing on didacticism. Mallory Valis, a student who helped to organize the trip (and winner of The Free Press 2024 high school essay contest), let The Review see a term paper she had written comparing Claudius with Machiavelli. Ms Seelaender graciously gave Ms Valis an extended audience after the panel, and perhaps one day we might have the privilege of including her research among our pages.

Either as notes or as developed articles all four of these papers are represented in this issue of TRGR.