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Quote of the day

Something I didn’t know before today*: the poet, scholar, and novelist Robert Graves was once enthralled by the poet, critic, and novelist Laura Riding. Indeed, he abandoned his first wife, Nancy Nicholson, for Riding. Graves considered Riding his muse, and considerably more:

The Graves–Riding partnership was a curious one, to say the least. Judging from Martin Seymour-Smith’s biography of Graves, it could easily be characterized by the title of one of Graves’s poems: “Sick Love.” For Graves, Riding was, variously, the incarnation of an ancient Mediterranean moon goddess, the embodiment of the perfection of poetry itself, and a feminist advocating the overthrow of male-dominated society.

A website devoted to the concept of the White Goddess - which shares its title with the famous treatise on poetic myth-making by Graves - provides this rather imperial repsonse by Riding to Graves:

Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift:

It is so nearly what would please me

I cannot but perfect it.

The sentiment is disturbingly evocative - never you mind why - but it still makes me smile.

*Thanks to the Google searcher who came here looking for the Riding quote; otherwise, I wouldn’t have learned something today.

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