Robert Graves (1895-1985), the author of “The Shout” was an English poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic who produced some 140 books. He was born in Wimbledon, south London, into a middle-class family. Graves’s childhood was a happy one, although he hated his school. He was educated at Charterhouse, where he started to write poetry and published his first volume of poems, “Over the Brazier”, in 1916. Graves did not graduate from Oxford University but joined the British Army in 1914.
Graves considered himself primarily a poet, but he could not live by poetry. His early lyrics were written in gloomy, late-Romantic style. His later works dealt mainly with love and marriage, birth and death, often set within a mythological framework. Classical literature and mythology became Graves a constant source of inspiration. According to Graves, women and poets are natural allies. Abstract reasoning is a predominantly male field of thought, and rational schooling discourages intuitive thought.
When I started to read “The Shout” I thought: “Oh no! Another boring story,” but as I kept on reading it, I couldn’t stop reading because I wanted to see what will happen further with the main characters of this story.…
