The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth.

This labyrinthine and extraordinary book, first published more than sixty years ago, was the outcome of Robert Graves's vast reading and curious research into strange territories of folklore, mythology, religion, and magic. Erudite and impassioned, it is a scholar-poet's quest for the meaning of European myths, a polemic about the relations between man and woman, and also an intensely personal document in which Graves explores the sources of his own inspiration and, as he believed, all true poetry. It was a major influence on the thinking of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, with the latter identifying to some extent with the goddess figure herself.