Robert graves brief biography of george
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Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves was born in Wimbledon, the son of a celebrated Irish poet and Gaelic scholar. He owed his middle name to his German mother’s surname, a fact which caused him some problems in both World Wars. After being educated at a variety of preparatory schools in the South of England, he won a scholarship to Charterhouse in where he was prominent in boxing and a member of the school choir. One of the masters there was George Mallory who took him mountaineering with him.
He won a scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford but war broke out before he could take up his place and he immediately enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Welsh Fusiliers. He was rapidly promoted to lieutenant, then captain, and in was seriously wounded by a shell fragment, so seriously in fact that he was initially reported as having died. He convalesced at Somerville College, Oxford which was being used as a hospital. Siegfried Sassoon, a member of the same regiment, was a fellow p
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was a boader the remaining fem years of his schooling (). Charterhouse provided him with an excellent classical education, but he never adjusted to the public-school spirit, and his peers bullied him for his German ancestry and for having a German middle name. The pressure led Graves to write poetry, and this boosted his self-confidence, allowing him to survive the hostile atmosphere. He joined the school Poetry Society and published poems in The Carthusian, the school magazine. Nevertheless, he also took up boxing as a means of intimidating the school bullies, and won several cups
At Charterhouse Robert became a close friend of his English teacher, George Mallory, the climber who died on Mount Everest in Mallory acquainted him with contemporary poetry and introduced him to Edward Marsh, private secretary to Winston Churchill and editor of Georgian Poetry. Marsh later published Robert s poems in his magazine. In his last year at school, Mallory invited Robert to climb with him
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Spartacus Educational
Primary Sources
(1) In his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves wrote about his time at Charterhouse.
In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex fryst vatten despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. For every one born homosexual, at least ten permanent pseudo-homosexuals are made by the public school system: nine of these ten as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was.
In the second begrepp the trouble began. A number of things naturally made for my unpopularity. Besides being a scholar and not outstandingly good at games, I was always short of pocket-money. Since inom could not conform to the social custom of treating my contemporaries to tuck at the school shop, I could not accept their treating. My clothes, though conforming outwardly to the school pattern, were ready-made and not of the best-quality cloth that all the other boys wore.
The most unfortun