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     “Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain”. E.M. Forster’s comments might serve as a salutary reminder in relation to Graves’s The White Goddess, a book which is oft-mentioned, if seldom finished. It is undoubtedly, as Grevel Lindop points out in his introduction, “difficult” in terms of its argument, style, and methodology. Nevertheless, it must also stand as one of the most significant books to be written this century. It holds its own, to greater or lesser degrees, in anthropology, literary criticism, theology, classical studies; it draws on art, science, music, myth, poetry, philosophy; its influence is felt in feminism, Celtic studies, and literary studies, and most notably in contemporary poetry. It can, it seems, become all things to all people. Or, more probably, nothing to anyone, unless they are a poet or a goddess-devotee, or both. Perhaps The White Goddess proves the point that when someone writes a truly interdisciplinary book, not many are prepared to read it in those terms.

     “The scholars”, Graves writes, “can be counted upon to refrain from any comment whatsoever” about The White Goddess. “But, after all, what is a scholar?”, he continues, “One who may not break bounds under pain of expulsion from the academy of which he is a member”. It is one of the anomalies of The White Goddess’s reception that Graves both complained about scholarly neglect of the book, yet simultaneously rejoiced in the fact that it confounded, and continues to confound, those orthodox scholars who, he claims, “cannot refute” the argument, but “dare not accept it”. It remains, therefore, one of the problems with the book that its instant appeal to New Age religions, and to the mystics, the occultists, seems to debar it to some extent from serious critical consideration. One needs only to mention The White Goddess in the loosest of terms and a general point about Graves, and about poetry, has been made: that we are on esoteric, muse-ridden ground, where Graves exists as the high-priest, as the archetypal “muse poet”, the poet’s poet. “White Goddess Land”, in this sense, is an artistic never-never land, 1890s aestheticism revisited with magic mushrooms, a world full of moon-worshippers, moon-goddesses, and, quite literally, lunatics.

     Few would envy Grevel Lindop the daunting task of editing this text, and of attempting to make the distinction between possible error and, not uncommon in Graves, sheer mischief, that the spirit of the text requires. Lindop’s is, in this respect, a monumental achievement, presenting the book as far as possible, with dedication and sensitivity, as Graves finally left it. Even more importantly perhaps, the virtue of the new edition is that The White Goddess now appears with a scholarly introduction, which suggests some of the possible contexts in which it deserves recognition: as autobiography, as “a critique of western civilisation”, as “an adventure in historical detective work”, as literary criticism, as the natural heir to Yeats’s A Vision, and also as a book which may be re-interpreted in the light of the Irish Literary Revival which provided much of its source material. It is also, as Paul O’Prey and others have suggested, a war book – it was written during the Second World War, in which Graves’s son David and the “true poet” Alun Lewis were killed – which is preoccupied with the dilemmas encountered by Graves himself as a soldier-poet in the Great War, and by the re-surfacing of those dilemmas in the Second World War. Its story of the ritual sacrifice of the God of the Year, to be replaced by the Goddess’s next spouse, who will also be sacrificed in his turn in a never-ending cycle of violence, is not without political resonances in a century of almost constant warfare; nor is it without biographical significance: Graves is a survivor of the Great War, but one well aware in The White Goddess of the fact that a child may become a sacrificial “surrogate for the sacred king”.

     Far from being an apolitical book, lost somewhere in “never-never land”, The White Goddess situates itself at the heart of contemporary debates – about religion (the bankruptcy of those conventional religions which have dissolved into sectarian struggles); about politics (notably the idealistic communism of the 1930s and, later, the onset of the Cold War); about profiteering and capitalist ideology; and about, implicitly, the misguided, dangerous historiography which fed the trenches of World War I and the gas chambers of World War II. Crucially, in terms of its influence, it tries to establish through its engagement with these debates a model for the poet’s response to, and responsibility towards, history. First and foremost, The White Goddess seeks an historical method which can accommodate both imagination and truth. Whether the finer points of Graves’s Celtic scholarship are right or wrong is, in this context, irrelevant, however much the book frustrates some of its more “knowledgeable” readers. Nor does it require, even if it seems to demand it, “religious” devotion. There are, Graves’s Claudius concludes, “two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth”. The White Goddess attempts both these things – to correct the falsification of myths by those who substituted “patrilinear for matrilinear institutions” (and in that sense, to demythologise), and also to point out the “ruin” brought about by neglect of that true history (or, in Graves’s terms, neglect of “the wishes of the lady of the house”), and by “capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry”. Since “money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet”, the poets, in one way, prove the good historians in the end.

     In Graves’s formulation, the poet remains a subversive figure who, even in “a civilisation in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured”, can still speak out against the odds, disrupt the status quo, refuse compromise. The poet in The White Goddess is “the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question”. Consequently, Graves’s far-reaching influence on contemporary poetry has more to do with poetic responsibility in historical crisis than with transcendental escapism. Ted Hughes, with his war-haunted imagination, and problematical muse, is, in England, his most obvious inheritor. In Ireland, Gravesian subversion comes to fruition notably in Derek Mahon’s poetry. (Heaney’s heavy-handed politicisation of the White Goddess myth in ‘Feeling into Words’ proves less liberating, if no less driven by responsibility-anxiety.) Graves asks the question at the beginning of The White Goddess that haunts poets this century – “What is the use or function of poetry?”. His answer sounds easy: “The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites”. But to read The White Goddess is also to recognise the difficulty inherent in the simple answer. Graves might claim that the White Goddess mythology liberates him from “the frantic strain of swimming against the stream of time”, but he is perhaps deceptive and self-deceiving here. The White Goddess, like Yeats’s A Vision, is, inevitably, concerned with the stream of time, with protecting poetry’s integrity in an era governed by “the unholy triumdivate of Pluto god of wealth, Apollo god of science, and Mercury god of thieves”.

     There are, of course, risks in taking The White Goddess too seriously. It is, Graves himself said, in some ways a “crazy” book, in which the wheat is not separated from the chaff. Nor does the new edition try to do that. But this is hardly its purpose, and as Lindop is acutely aware in his introduction, it would be a mistake to reduce the book to anything more definable, and therefore less, than it is. Graves was not without a sense of humour in relation to the origins of The White Goddess, writing to Alan Hodge in 1943, “I find myself making the Bards into Moon-men and the minstrels into Sun-men. Help!”. But it does have serious points to make, and also makes a serious contribution to contemporary debates. That Robert Graves is flagged by Faber and Faber in their publicity for this edition as “part of the traditional wing of English poetry and letters” might also therefore be a cause for concern – unless the traditional wing has become the truly subversive wing. The White Goddess’s central thesis offers a challenge to traditional views of history, and to traditional versions of literary history: “the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse”, and “this remains the language of true poetry” even though the language was, he argues, “tampered with” and the myths falsified in order to “justify... social changes”.

     Lindop suggests that “no one can fully understand the modern world who has not at least considered [The White Goddess’s] arguments”. At the very least, a new edition of the book should help to precipitate debate about Graves in areas where he is still neglected (notably in Irish literary and cultural studies). Whatever else it may or may not do, The White Goddess is guaranteed to surprise, especially to surprise those who feel they know, second-hand, what it contains. At the close of the introduction, Grevel Lindop describes the reader as being “on the verge of the enchanted forest”. In more ways than one might suspect, he is right.