The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

Tight, square, uncreased spine has a .25-inch cosmetic closed tear at the head of the exterior. Clean, unmarked interior. Some gentle edge-wear, but no other notable wear. Cover design by Milton Glaser. Originally conceived as an answer to The Golden Bough ('Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all around his dangerous subject,' Graves said), this uncategorizable book cycled through two very different working titles—The Roebuck in the Thicket and The Three-Fold Muse—during the course of its writing. Graves's process included what he termed 'analeptic thought', a type of historical clairvoyance in which the poet received impressions from the distant past and which ended up proving insufficiently rigorous for many scholars. T. S. Eliot called it 'a prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book', and Laura Riding, whose influence on Graves during its writing was crucial, said upon reading it, 'Where once I reigned, now a whorish abomination has sprung to life, a Frankenstein pieced together from the shards of my life and thoughts.' 541 pp.