Boylan, Henry (1998). A Dictionary of Irish Biography, 3rd Edition. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan. p.152. ISBN 0-7171-2945-4. Hutton, Ronald (1993). The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. John Wiley & Sons. p.320. ISBN 9780631189466. The Greek Myths, two volumes, Penguin Books, 1955, condensed edition, Viking, 1992, as The Greek Myths: Complete Edition, Viking, 1993.

The Crowning Privilege: The Clark Lectures, 1954–1955. London: Cassell, 1955; New York: Doubleday, 1956. language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry... O'Conner, Patricia T. (4 January 2018). "The Reader Over Your Shoulder". The Paris Review . Retrieved 11 January 2018. Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons". Graves argues that "true" or "pure" poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and of her son.This is a dreadful book...yet I’ve read it twice, the 1st time in the early ‘80s and again in ’13. It hasn’t gotten any better. On the re-read I read more critically and cross ref’d him. After the 1st read I had a bee in my bunnet about his made up tree alphabet nonsense (see above review), on the 2nd read I now realise he just made up pretty much everything else too. It is likely enough that this cult was introduced into Ireland in the reign of Heremon, the nineteenth King of All Ireland, the date of whose accession is traditionally given as 1267BC, though Dr. Joyce, a reliable modern authority, makes it 1015BC. Heremon, one of the invading Milesians from Spain, became sole monarch of Ireland by his victory over the armies of the North…

An Observer review praised the “great insight” provided by the Graves-Mulligan correspondence, which began in 1964. Their letters, as Catling noted, appear “in the easy style of love letters, recounting the small colorful details of their work, opinions, domestic arrangements and moods.” Sage similarly commended Seymour’s Robert Graves: Life on the Edge, described by the critic as a “balanced, convincing, rounded” portrait. Commenting on the biographer’s description of Graves’s near-death wounding on the Somme in 1916, Sage noted, “as Miranda Seymour says—it would have been hard [for Graves] not to feel a touch mythic, ‘as if he had been borne again.’” As a result of all this deconstruction and reweaving of myth, it is very difficult to pin down Graves theses. One thesis is that of the poetic continuity of the worship of The White Goddess in ancient times through the Irish and Welsh poetic traditions (by way of the Greeks, mainly the Dannites, if I understood correctly) and even further through the cult of Mary and Jesus. Much of the last half of the book is dedicated to these arguments. I found them somewhat convincing, but I still have strong doubts about a few of his inferences regarding some sects of Christianity and the Jewish tradition from which they stemmed. At first glance, like so much of The White Goddess, this seems like a vaguely plausible statement. It has dates! It has reliable modern authorities! It has “as we have seen”! But my imagination is not nearly poetic enough—it is, perhaps, too “rigidly scientific”—to accept the nested sets of assumptions contained herein:Also, he seems to show little demarcation between deities (x appears to be y, who is actually z, but on closer inspection is really the same as a, who was worshipped as b etc etc etc). This syncretism is all well and good, but when the Venn diagram of deities ignores everything but the bits that fit his hypothesis and the focus is purely on the overlap I start to smell shite in the argument.