Regenerating Graves: Media Adaptations of the Work and Thought of Robert Graves provides a set of interdisciplinary readings that look at adaptations, revisions, and re-inventions of the work of poet, novelist, and mythographer Robert Graves, and consider how adaptations alter, preserve, and revitalize a single author’s work. Despite the continued growth of Graves scholarship (with over forty-five dissertations and master’s theses written in the last decade, as well as numerous monographs, several biographies, journal essays, and book chapters), the relevance of Graves’s work to later generations of writers, artists and composers, has mostly gone undiscussed. Similarly undiscussed has been the fraught relationship of media adaptations to the public perception of Graves’s work and reputation. With the imminent release of The Laureate, a film treatment of Graves’s personal relationships in the nineteen twenties (drawn significantly from Graves’s autobiographical writing), as well as a second BBC production of his Claudius novels, it becomes increasingly possible to extend critical focus to the question of media transpositions. Engaging questions of influence, adaptation, creative transposition, and what we are calling regeneration, Regenerating Graves will shed light on the idiomatic relationship of a writer who fled modernity and the City/Metropolis to live in a rustic farming village and insisted on writing with a quill pen to a contemporary, technological and technocratic society, as well as larger questions of influence and reception.

Our first presenter, Amber Manning, a graduate student at Duke University, will begin our conversation by looking at the transformations of the monumental figure of the White Goddess (a notional symbol of poetic intentionality dominating the last three decades of Graves’s writing), in the work of three contemporary poets/works: Diane di Prima’s Loba, Robin Blaser’s Streams II, and Joseph Donahue’s Terra Lucida. Her paper, “Muse, the Mother of All Living:” Contemporary Poetic Reincarnation(s) of the White Goddess,” will consider how these poems think about the relationship of inspiration and language as configured in Graves’s mythopoeic imagery and suggest ways in which the works characterize writing and reading as a state of pending, with resonances in the contemporary moment (particularly during the pandemic). Ms Manning’s syncretic analysis will explode the unproductive view of the White Goddess as a patriarchal invention.

Dr. Chris Nicholson, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, will echo and transpose Ms. Manning’s discussion of reinscription while shifting our focus from ontological considerations to the psychological in his examination of Jerzy Skolimowski’s film treatment of Graves’s short story “The Shout” (1978). Dr. Nicholson will pay particular attention to the significance of sound—a crucial sense in any poetic, but certainly more central to a lyric poet, particularly one remembered, as the poet Michael Longley writes in his introduction to Selected Poems (2013), as “the master of the singing line.” “Translating Trauma through Text and Film: Reverberations of Robert Graves’s The Shout,” will consider Skolimowski’s use of audio to foreground the psychological nuances in Graves’s acoustic imagery, which he will discuss as echoes of Graves’s traumatic auditory experience of trench warfare in World War One.

Extending an emphasis on sound, composer and librettist Jolyon Laycock will then focus on the concept of creative regeneration through transposition. Dr. Laycock will discuss how originary meanings survive textual and generic transformation via underlying linguistic patterns. His paper, “In Search of the Summer Child,” will use his own libretto to highlight a double act of regeneration: how his recasting of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tale of Hafren, the titular goddess of the River Severn, reinterpreted and orchestrated patterns articulated in The Greek Myths and The White Goddess. In his presentation, contemporary musical play writing, ancient clerical writing, and Gravesian reading perform a creative hermeneutics, as reader and writer engage in acts of self-presencing through the performance of text. Like Dr. Nicholson and Ms. Manning, Dr. Laycock locates Graves’s work in a larger continuum, in which reading and writing serve as performative acts of continual revitalization. Presentations will include clips of film and music, and ideally the panel will conclude with lively discussion among panelists and audience.