Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July, 1895 – 7 December, 1985) was an English scholar, poet, and novelist. During his long life, he produced more than 140 works in total. He was the son of Alfred Perceval Graves, the Anglo-Irish writer. The historian Leopold von Ranke was his mother's uncle, and he inherited the name.

Life

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Graves, born in Wimbledon, England, received his early education at Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford University. However, the prospect of spending another four years of his life studying Latin and Greek did not appeal to the nineteen-year-old Graves, and with the outbreak of World War I he enlisted almost immediately in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (RWF). He published his first volume of poems, Over The Brazier, in 1916, but he later tried to suppress his war poetry. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he received such serious injuries that his family were informed of his death. However, he recovered, at the cost of permanent damage to his lungs, and, after a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England, despite his efforts to return to the front.

In 1917, Graves played an important part in saving his fellow poet, Siegfried Sassoon, from a court-martial after the latter went absent without leave and wrote to his commanding officer denouncing the war. The two officers had become firm friends while serving with the RWF. Graves's biographies document the story well, and it is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's Fairies and Fusiliers (1916), which collection contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Sassoon himself remarked upon a "heavy sexual element" within it, which observation is heavily supported by the sentimental nature of much of the surviving correspondence between the two men. Through Sassoon, Graves also encountered Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of twelve Apostle spoons".

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