In the first chapter of The White Goddess Graves makes a substantive distinction between poets and gleemen (ancient Welsh court-bards who recited a certain type of poem that complied with the wishes of the King and later of the Church), suggesting that a true poet possesses a free, creative spirit which enables him not only to produce verses but to encounter and communicate the ‘Theme’ which is the mystery of life. Graves therefore clearly distinguishes between rigid, sterile, rationally-orientated versification, and inspired poetry, which is composed supralogically; between, in fact, two modes of thinking: the rational, identified with authority and aggression, and the ‘supralogical’, identified with imagination, quiescence, creativity. While this opposition causes Graves tremendous frustration during the war years, it is eventually transformed into the conviction that true poetry which is ‘composed at the back of the mind’ is indeed powerful and ultimately superior to the rigid rationality which is inspired by the Apollonian manner of thinking. From Graves’s perspective it was this Apollonian thinking which encouraged the war and condoned its cruelty. A true poet himself and not a gleeman who flatters authority and the status quo and echoes its rhetoric, he depicts war in all its monstrosity. Though an exemplary soldier who demonstrated valour and determination at the front, he was ideologically opposed to the war and to the British government and Establishment that encouraged it. In one of his interviews he states: ‘A poet is a person who lives and thinks in a certain way. A poet doesn’t necessarily write poems. It is simply an attitude, and there are a great many more poets around than meet the eye.’ Similarly, in Poetic Craft and Principle he writes that poetry – even Beowulf – is not a department of literature as studied in the English School, but a way of being and thinking: as it were the power of walking down a familiar corridor and suddenly disappearing through a stone wall at the end. (p. 155)
Poetry is a particular outlook on life and a constant search for truth and knowledge. It is a profound and esoteric experience which penetrates and acts as a catalyst in every aspect of a person’s life, and Graves actually practised this belief and took his role as a poet very seriously. Another war experience that is resonant in the theory of the White Goddess is the experience of trench warfare itself. Inherent in the trench both as a location and a concept is the notion of liminality. It is a locus of engagement with the enemy, but without actual confrontation with the enemy, who remains unknown and unidentified. From a spatial point of view the trench is a liminal, in-between space, a threshold of victory and conquest. It is a fixed and geographically designated territory and at the same time the arena of the continuous struggle for conquest. The soldiers do not fight in the traditional manner, which involves a linear progressive movement towards the enemy and his territory, but are restricted to a minimal space where they are engaged in a process of a distant exchange of fire which in turn metaphorises the semantics of trench warfare. Fighting in the trenches is therefore not a clash in the traditional form of a confrontational, territorial fight but a peculiar form of warfare based on distant fighting and in that sense a precursor of the modern virtual war that we have been witnessing during the last few decades. This absence of linear movement combined with territorial restriction results in a transcendence of space, since the soldiers are physically in the trench but at the same time the impact of their military activity is on the other side of the wire where their shells and bullets conclude their deadly journey. Consequently the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ lose their fixed definitions and signification, they merge and are transformed into a liminal Überspace where boundaries and territorial demarcations are blurred. This Überspace signifies the spatial liminality inherent in the experience of trench fighting and which in turn suggests a temporal liminality where time is suspended precisely because of the absence of the traditional soldier-to-soldier confrontation. As a consequence of the distance,