CANNANNEW REPORT

Here’s the relevant extract from the diaries of Irish poet Thomas McCarthy. Graves wrote amongst other things, I Claudius and the classic 1st world war memoir .. “Goodbye To All That”   1975 May 5th A sensational English Literature Society reading. Robert Graves came to visit us from Majorca. I sat beside him and his wife at the Oyster dinner. He said to me that Rupert Brooke was ‘the nicest of the Georgians’. He also said that ‘of that lot’ Winston Churchill was the only gentleman. He said that poetry is no longer being written in England but that he got ‘the sense of poetry’ when he landed in Ireland. I doubt this statement on poetry in England. Poetry is a natural occurrence in the population, very like a winter virus. England with its vast population must have at least ten times more poets than Ireland. At the reception after his reading he was besieged by people. Very fatigued, with a face the colour of aluminium. He looked at the crush of students, then looked at me, the Auditor of the English Lit, and seemed very frightened. He expected me to do something, to control somehow the adoration of this Irish crowd. I went over, sat beside him, actually held his hand, and talked to him for a while.

Then Montague announced that I’ll be the first gardener-poet of Ireland. Graves looked up at him, wondering what this statement had to do with anything in the great poet’s life. For all his personal anarchy and independence Montague has a very academic, categorizing mind: he sees himself as the Exile-Poet, Heaney as the Farmer-Poet; and now he wants me, his student, to become the Gardener-Poet. He is happiest once a category has been settled upon. I find such categorizing…

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Source : Irish Poet’s Diaries Reveal English Writer & Poet Robert Graves Was Psilocybin User Having Been Gifted Mushrooms By Carlos Castenada

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