Criticism
The White Goddess has been seen as a poetic work where Graves gives his notion of man's subjection to women in love an "anthropological grandeur" and further mythologises all women in general (and several of Graves's lovers in specific) into a three-faced moon goddess model. Graves's value as a poet aside, flaws in his scholarship such as poor philology, misdating texts (for example, the Hanes Taliesin a 16th-18th century text which Graves believed originated centuries earlier), and use of out-dated archeology have been criticised. Some scholars, particularly archeologists, historians and folklorists have not received the work favourably. Graves was disappointed that his work was "loudly ignored" by many Celtic scholars; however, it was accepted as history by many non-scholarly readers and, according to Ronald Hutton, The White Goddess remains a major source of confusion about the ancient Celts and influences many un-scholarly views of Celtic paganism. Hilda Ellis Davidson criticized Graves as having "misled many innocent readers with his eloquent but deceptive statements about a nebulous goddess in early Celtic literature", and stated that he was "no authority" on the subject matter he presented. While Graves made the association between Goddesses and the moon appear "natural," it was not so to the Celts or some other ancient peoples. Some Neopagans have been bemused and upset by the scholarly criticism that The White Goddess has received in recent years, while others have appreciated its poetic insight but never accepted it as a work of historical veracity.
Michael W. Pharand, though quoting earlier criticisms, rebutted, "Graves's theories and conclusions, outlandish as they seemed to his contemporaries (or may appear to us), were the result of careful observation."
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)