Graves returned to Majorca in May, 1946, after an enforced absence of ten years. His departure, from an island turned Falangist, had been precipitate; his return, with Beryl and their children, was more ceremonious. He was at the height of his career in terms of achievement, if not yet of recognition: his best book of verse, Poems 1938–1945, had been recently published, and The White Goddess was with Eliot at Faber. The present volume – successor to In Broken Images (1982), which covered the years 1914–46 – opens at this point, with Graves writing happily about Deyá to old friends like James Reeves and Alan Hodge.

O’Prey’s selection is, of necessity, highly selective, for Graves was prolific in correspondence as in everything else (I use the past tense since he has now stopped writing): a mere fraction of his epistolary output is represented here. Important material is absent – notably, says O’Prey in his introduction, letters to ‘the four Muses’ (the four young women who, with Beryl’s consent, served as chaste sources of agitation and inspiration in the Fifties and Sixties, and to whom he wrote hundreds of letters). Too bad, but no doubt all this stuff will come to light in time. The letters here deal not so much with inspiration as with perspiration, and much of the time with prose.

Among the recipients who appear most often are Eliot, Liddell Hart, Joshua Podro and Idries Shah – Eliot as publisher and grudgingly respected fellow-poet (‘He knows an awful lot about poetry, you know; an awful lot’); Liddell Hart as a fellow T E Lawrence buff (Sam Spiegel approached Graves about Lawrence of Arabia); Podro as a Biblical scholar; Shah as a student of Sufism. There is a helpful and unobtrusive linking narrative, though the selection is best read in conjunction with the appropriate chapters of Martin Seymour-Smith’s biography.

There is no single classic letter here to compare with the one to Eliot (In Broken Images, page 342) declining to sign a petition on behalf of Ezra Pound (‘May I be judged with equal severity on the Last Day’); but there are great moments throughout – as when, in 1947, he provides Eliot with answers to Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘puzzling questions though not beyond all conjecture’: (i) what name Achilles took when he hid among women and (ii) what song the Sirens sang. The answers are (i) Drosoessa and (ii) ‘a Hellenization of the corresponding early Irish addresses to heroes from priestesses of Avalon’.

One of Graves’s most engaging traits is a readiness with abstruse information of mythical or magical provenance – his stock-in-trade, after all. He is never a bore about it, as Yeats was a bore about the occult and Pound about economics. Graves’s information is (literally) charming, and offered in an easy, take-it-or-leave-it manner, as when an English doctor friend, whose wife had twice miscarried, asks him for ‘magical’ advice to ensure a safe delivery third time round. Clear all rubbish out of the house and burn it, says Graves. ‘A bunch of primroses would please the Goddess and, when nobody is snooping, a handful of pearl barley laid on a raised stone …’ It worked, of course.

There’s a funny side to Graves’s Goddess-worship, a hieratic version of the Curse of Gnome: of two publishers who rejected The White Goddess, one died three weeks later and another was found ‘hanging from a tree in his garden dressed in a skirt, blouse, knickers and brassiere. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ Graves certainly ‘believed’ this sort of thing, in such a way that the line between simile and metaphor becomes blurred: ‘The Goddess has been plaguing me lately, very cruelly, and I have managed to satisfy her by two or three poems written in red arterial blood; she appeared in person in Deyá during the last full moon, swinging a Cretan axe …’

Another attractive trait is his loyalty to old friends. This can lead to delusions, as when he writes to Liddell Hart: ‘The suggestion that [T E Lawrence] was homosexual is absurd and indecent; the truth seems to be that he was flogged into impotence at Deraa and thus unable to consummate his heterosexual love for [the Muse]’. (Graves’s horror of male homosexuality is proverbial.) A corollary of this loyalty is a certain unforgivingness. Invited to meet a Count von Luckner, ‘the 1914–18 U-boat hero’, he writes: ‘However anti-Hitler he may have been, and however good a European, I think not. Some mental trauma prevents’. That was in 1955.

The letter that comes closest to classic status here is one to Idries Shah about the nature of genius, which Graves defines according to its original Latin meaning, ‘conscience’ being an important constituent (thus an ‘evil genius’ is a contradiction in terms). Genius is necessarily heterosexual, says Graves, so the pederastic Michelangelo ‘leaves me cold’ – as do all gays from Plato to Auden. Napoleon is disqualified for being a gunner and not ‘a man of the sword’. Dowland is preferred to Beethoven. Chekhov to Tolstoy. Shakespeare gets by okay despite a flirtation with his own sex.

My one complaint is that O’Prey has included only letters to friends and to the Press and sought out none of those to the many unknowns who wrote to Graves over the years about, principally, The White Goddess – a cult book among the more literate hippies, for example. Graves always answered letters, even fan-mail from students, and the glimpses we get of him writing to strangers (in Seymour-Smith’s biography) reveals a side of his personality which has received insufficient attention: his lively engagement with the contemporary world.

Though male – no, because male, and especially at his most ‘regimental’ – Graves has much to say to the eco-feminist lobby (‘Women and poets are natural allies’). He supplied feminism with a wealth of anthropological and historical information; he anticipated by many years the ‘womanly times’ now so keenly awaited; his poetic personality provides the perfect paradigm of a maleness which, by submitting itself to the female principle, enhances its own nature; and if he did stick the Muse on a pedestal (‘Man does, woman is’), well, a dash of romantic idealism never harmed a good cause.

One of the last letters here, to an American friend, concerns C R Dalton’s Without Hardware, a book about the mysterious deaths, in the early 1960s, of certain people connected with the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. The book, which I haven’t read, appears to be a work of investigative journalism. C R Dalton was Graves’s daughter Catherine, and her husband was one of those murdered. Graves had spoken in The White Goddess of ‘the irreligious improvidence with which man is exhausting the earth’, and he clearly feels that human folly and wickedness are enjoying exponential growth. Those who still dismiss him as an ivory-tower poet might ponder the implications of his work.