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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
One of Robert Graves's favorites among his own poems is “The Naked and the Nude,” frequently anthologized but rarely commented upon by critics. Sir Kenneth Clark's The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), a work of art history, most likely served as the initial stimulus for this poem. The initial chapter of Clark's book, which appeared one year before Graves's poem, has the same title as the poem. Analysis shows that the poem develops an argument for frank, direct nakedness as opposed to cunning, prurient nudity; this argument is also implied in Clark's monumental study of nude art. Further, Clark is himself influenced by various English poets; hence, a reciprocal process is here at woik, resulting in a cross-pollination between two distinct disciplines. Discovery of this catalyst for Graves's poem is valuable because it provides us with insights into the nature of Graves's imaginative processes, and it also helps to explain Graves's preference for this poem.
1 E.g., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, rev. éd., ed. M. H. Abrams et al. (New York: Norton, 1968), ii, 1889–90; Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1969), pp. 42–44. The early appearances of the poem were in New Yorker. 32 (16 Feb. 1957), 16; New Statesman, 53 (16 March 1957), 356; Robert Graves, 5 Pens in Hand (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 348. Graves's statement concerning his deletions from the subsequent collections of his poems is found in Robert Graves, Collected Poems (London: Cassell, 1965), Foreword, n.p.
2 Curiously, in the only real book-length study of Graves's poetry the poem is dismissed as tedious. Michael Kirkham, The Poetry of Robert Graves (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), says that “charm can run to prosiness, as in the tedious ‘The Naked and the Nude,‘ ” p. 240. This unfortunate remark, one of the few critical comments one can locate, does not reflect the unrecorded response of other readers of the poem. Perhaps it was the inevitable result of reading too much Graves at one sitting.
3 Washington, D. C. : Pantheon, 1956. This book, in the Bollingen Series (Ser. xxxv, No. 2), consists of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for 1953, delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C.
4 Of course, Graves might have written his poem exactly as we have it without ever having seen Clark's book. However, the resemblances are so striking as to force one to conclude that the poet read the book and was stimulated to crystallize some of his own similar views in writing the poem. Curiously, in a letter to me (1 Aug. 1970), Mr. Graves says he did not see Clark's book and that he never reads art histories.
5 From Blake's Gnomic Verses :
What is it men in women do require ? The lineaments of gratified desire. What is it women do in men require ? The lineaments of gratified desire.
The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. John Sampson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1913), p. 197.
6 In World War i, volumes of “Blake and Keats were his companions in the trenches.” J. M. Cohen, Robert Graces (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 11.
7 Cohen says that on the whole, “measured optimism outweighs pessimism in the poet's whole production.” Robert Graves, p. 5.
8 Graves occupies an “intermediate position nearer to the Classical pole than to the Romantic.” Robert Graves, p. 7.