Written By: Robert Palmer
Robert Graves (1895–1985) on the surface appears to be two very different writers. On one hand, he is the First World War poet in league with other third-wave veterans of war verse, such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, raging against the mechanised slaughter of their generation. Poems like “Sargeant-Major Money” twist and satirise military incompetence through the detachment and tragic humour of soldiers on the brink of death. On the other hand, Graves is the novelist who made early Imperial Rome funny and terrifying in I, Claudius and Claudius the God, both imbued with plots, poisoning, palace intrigue, and the haunting narrative presence of Livia. It is easy to split Graves in two, as the disillusioned soldier turned memoirist, and the modern father of Rome with humour. Yet, critically, they are both the same person: one man with the core focus of surviving the chaos of historical significance whilst holding onto identity.
Graves was of the generation of young men who enlisted almost instinctively in 1914 upon the outbreak of war in Europe, fighting, initially, for patriotism and national idealism. Like many of his contemporaries, that illusion was quickly shattered. Surviving the Somme, as he recounts in his memoir Goodbye to All That, left him both physically and mentally scarred. Within this context, Graves became friends with Siegfried Sassoon, visiting him at Craiglockhart, where he was being treated for what was then called ‘neurasthenia’ (what we would now recognise as PTSD). There he also crossed paths with Wilfred Owen, and it was here that three of the most prominent war poets wrote and conversed with one another, each approaching the tragedy of the Western Front from different angles. Owen pursued brutal experimental honesty, laying bare the horror of war in poems like “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” “The Sentry,” and “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Sassoon expressed outrage and fury in explicit protest in “They” and his parliamentary protest in 1917, “A Soldier’s Declaration.” Graves, though, often reached for dark humour and irony, likening the war to the past to pick apart the terrible absurdity of command and the devastation of the Western Front. Graves’s poems are not detached from this reality; they carry the wit of a man who knew that survival was just as much an accident as a result of courage.
This experience was never in isolation from his interest in the Classical World, which he studied at the University of Oxford as a fellow after the war. Graves’s war verse frequently draws back to antiquity, such as in “The Legion,” which plays between two soldiers’ response to new recruits, drawing a parallel to the camaraderie between the men fighting in the trenches despite the abhorrent conditions of war. “The Legion” ends on the somewhat hopeful note, “And these same men before autumn’s fall / Shall bang old Vercingetorix out of Gaul.” Despite Graves’s attempt in 1929 to move away from the war in Goodbye to All That and his excise of war poetry in later published collections of his verse, he did return to the war both explicitly in verse in “Recalling War” and in the themes that shaped his literary career.
For, when Graves turned to Rome, he did not leave behind the centrality of survival and identity, he just shifted the stage. The Claudius novels are, at their core, about remaining through chaos, violence, power, and intrigue. On the surface, Claudius is a fool. Mocked for his limp and stammer, pushed to the sidelines of the imperial family, he is overlooked and systematically underestimated. Graves frames this shallow view of Claudius as a fictionalised autobiography, building on the historical Claudius’s lost works of history, giving him a voice to narrate how he might have risen to power. Claudius survives because he is ignored. His assumed physical and intellectual inadequacies make him invisible to his family until he can no longer be overlooked. Graves focuses this portrait of survival with humour. Murders, betrayals, and schemes are written as if they were gossip overheard in a primary school playground, stripping them of their powerful allure but not of their horror. This distance forces us as readers to confront the cruelty in all its absurdity making power politics in the dysfunctional Julio-Claudian family both funny and terrifying. Central to all this is Livia, written with icy brilliance as both mother and monster, plotting behind every scene. What makes both I, Claudius and Claudius the God stand out is not their historical accuracy, but Graves’s ability to show how history feels when you are trapped inside it.
Robert Graves, both soldier-poet and Roman historical novelist, is the same writer depicting two different moments of history. The Western Front and Julio-Claudian Rome were both places where survival was absurd and provide space for writing to show identity within chaos. Where Owen made real the raw human horror of war and Sassoon pleaded against it in rage, Graves mocked the absurdity of the past and present without denying the devastating cost. The same literary voice speaks in the Claudius novels. A supposed fool survives because he is ignored, and the poet survives because he is lucky. What links the two is more than the violence, rather it is the tone of a man who saw beneath the destruction and found humour in the insanity.
Graves was not two writers. He was one man haunted by history, finding the same narrative in war and in Rome – how to survive, and even laugh, when everything around you insists you should not.
As put by Claudius,
“So I was thinking, ‘So I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I’ll be able to make people read my books now.’”
Bibliography
Graves, Robert. Claudius the God. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1934.
Graves, Robert. Goodbye to All That. London, Penguin, 1929.
Graves, Robert. I, Claudius. Camberwell, Vic., Penguin Books, 1934.
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Parker, Peter. “Robert Graves: The Reluctant First World War Poet.” New Statesman, 29 Aug. 2018, http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/08/robert-graves-reluctant-first-world-war-poet. Accessed 3 Oct. 2025.
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Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. “Dr W. H. R. Rivers: Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves’ “Fathering Friend.”” Brain, vol. 140, no. 12, 14 Nov. 2017, pp. 3378–3383, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awx303.
Featured Image Credit: Bust of the Roman Emperor Claudius, https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2539/roman-emperor-claudius/
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