Claudius the Pod

I am experiencing a Jungian garage sale of synchronicity on the internet at the moment, mostly centered around H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Graves. I would provide links to all the sites that reference these two titans of literature, but then I am also experiencing an Oblomov's worth of laziness on the internet at the moment, and so I can't be bothered.
I wrote about my special relationship with Lovecraft last year in The Plastic Horrors, but I don't think I've ever scribbled much on the subject of the Welsh-Mallorcan bard.
We read his poems in school, of course: "This is a wild land, country of my choice/With harsh craggy mountain, moor ample and bare"; and we perused 'The Long Weekend' leisurely at weekends; and then I never returned 'Goodbye To All That' to Lichfield Public Library because I couldn't say goodbye to it. But it wasn't until I broke the spine of Andraste's copy of 'The White Goddess' that I began to fully appreciate the Gravesian gravitas in all its full grave glory.
I suppose that 'I, Claudius' and 'Claudius the God' are his most famous works, if only because of the absurdly over-praised television adaptation, starring the bizarrely orange-faced Derek Jacobi. Mind you, the fabulously gifted Sian Phillips manages to somehow make the whole sorry spectacle extremely watchable, wiping the floor with every portrayal of a Roman matron before and since. Indeed, she is the only actor in the series who doesn't swan around the cardboard scenery with "BBC Drama School" stamped on her forehead.
Oh dear. I seem to have wandered off the topic of Robert Graves' literary genius and written a panegyric of an older women instead. Never mind, I think the old goat himself would approve.

Comments

[Andraste]

I still have that same copy of The White Goddess...and as it happens, I very recently watched the entire "I, Claudius" series here referenced. You are right, of course - it hasn't stood the test of time and John Hurt's Caligula was painful to watch. But Sian Philips was superb, and saved the day.