Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography



Annotated Bibliography

Graves to Alan Hodge, 1943, In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves, 1914-1946, pp. 315-16.

According to Graves “Graves will assume that the history of English poetry was the Modification of the original moon, that Graves concluded, in the second and enlarged edition, that the monotheistic God of Judaism and its successors were the cause of the collapse of the White Goddess, and thus the source of much of grief in the modern world. He also suggested that women cannot work as poets and lacks the capacity for true poetic creation, the role of women in poetry remains only to serve as a muse for a male poet who adores her as a goddess. He, however, acknowledged Sappho as a possible exception.

Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 190.

The research says that,” The religion of the Goddess was, according to Graves, the earliest religion of humankind. A religion that has been systematically suppressed since the thirteenth century BC when a race of patriarchal invaders conquered the matriarchal culture which worshipped the Goddess in what is now Greece, overturned her shrines, and replaced them with those of their own male god, the Olympian Zeus”.

Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge, Kent, D. S. Brewer, 1980), pp. 21-22.

According to Jean “Graves maintains, survived for centuries in the mystery cults of late classical antiquity, the medieval Welsh and Irish bardic schools, and the witch cult of early modern Europe, until each of these was suppressed in its turn by the Christian Church. Driven ever further underground, the 'moon magical' language of the ancient rites performed in honor of the White Goddess maintains a tenuous link to our own era through poetry - principally through anonymous English popular ballads, Shakespeare, and the Romantics”. Graves described The ...