Robert Graves's reputation must rest chiefly on his poetry and historical fiction; as an essayist he is extremely uneven. His essays are generally polemical, frequently eccentric. As a literary critic he is at times judicious, more often idiosyncratic, and sometimes prejudiced. Nonetheless, his critical essays provide a fascinating commentary on the forces which shaped him as a poet. His humorous and polemical essays add up to a coherent criticism of the "goddawfulness" of "all that"--the spiritual and moral poverty of the modern England which he abandoned for Majorca. His frequent adventures into anthropology and mythology in search of his White Goddess are to be seen not merely as a reflection of his complex relationships with women but chiefly as an attempt to erect a personal poetic mythology over against the various mythologies, both religious and scientific, of the modern world. The joy and ecstasy of goddess worship...