Robert Graves

Poet / Writer

Robert Graves was a poet, professor, and the author of Goodbye to All That (1929), a landmark anti-heroic memoir of life in the trenches during World War I. He is even better known for his historical novels about the Roman emperor Claudius: I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935). Despite those successes, Graves was primarily a poet: he published dozens of volumes of his verse during his life, and was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1961-66. Graves lived most of his adult life on the island of Majorca, at first with fellow poet Laura Riding, and later with his second wife Beryl Hodge.

Extra credit: The highly successful BBC mini-series I, Claudius (1976) was based on Graves's work... His fellow professors at Oxford included Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien... Graves is no relation to the architect Michael Graves.