Abstract
Robert Graves's reputation as a war poet, as an Oxford Professor of Poetry, and as a maniacally faithful historical novelist, seems to have gone beyond the clouds of oblivion. Instead, as a fastidious mossback poet haunted by the leprous White Goddess, he has only been looked back on from time to time in the ominous context of the Goddess myth. It seems to me, however, that before then there had been a premonitory power that had driven the poet forward to the Goddess Cult. Christianity and Jesus Christ Himself were the power, and through an antagonism against and an inverted image of this driving force, he finally reached his own identification after a long period of desperate struggle. In my view, this process involves three extraordinary aspects: 1) he is the kind of poet who constructs his own self by disapproval and denouncement of the other self, 2) on the stage of this drama of rejection and reprobation, the main character is a fallen angel whose name is "Presumption," and 3) in the eyes of the poet, the sin of "presumption" is not such a dire, ominous concept dwelling in the dark innermost recesses of the human mind, but an image of a sadistic executioner who rapturously chases a man into the easthetic impasse of tragedy. Contrary to everyone's expectations, these aspects are explicitly or implicitly reflected, not in his poetry, but in his prose works which he often insisted he had written for money. Therefore, through an inquiry into his historical as well as Biblical rewritings, I would like to illustrate what kind of hidden course he had pursued before he reached his ultimate identification with the Goddess's helpmate.
