Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Finnegans Wake, a poem of sleep and flux, is also a masterpiece of systematic ambiguity, honoring less the waking mind that made it than the night world of humanity and the mythic "nightmare of history" from which Joyce as a young man said he wished to awake. Critics may wonder if Finnegans Wake is not a huge, jesting and virtuoso footnote to Joyce's simplest and finest poem, Ecce Puer, written soon after his father died and his grandson Stephen was born...
...almost bound to happen. Graves has been interested for years in the Imperial Roman period and the Near East into which Jesus Christ was born. Graves has written ingeniously learned novels about Rome (I, Claudius), Byzantium (Count Belisarius), the mythic age of Greece (Hercules, My Shipmate). His friend, the late great T. E. Lawrence, who spent the best years of his life between the Nile and the Promised Land, once amused himself by mapping the probable route of the Israelites in the Sinai desert. Graves's latest job is in the same line but not so modest...