Editing The White Goddess (section)

== History ==
Graves first wrote the book under the title of ''The Roebuck in the Thicket'' in a three-week period during January 1944, only a month after he had finished ''The Golden Fleece''. He then left it to focus on ''King Jesus,'' a historical novel about the life of Jesus. Returning to ''The Roebuck in the Thicket'', he renamed it ''The Three-Fold Muse'', before finishing it and retitling it as ''The White Goddess''. In January 1946 he sent it to the publishers, and in May 1948 it was published in the UK, and in June 1948 in the US, as ''The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth''.<ref name="Hutton">{{cite book |title=The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft|url=https://archive.org/details/triumphofmoonhis00hutt|url-access=registration|publisher=Oxford University Press |author=Hutton, Ronald|pages=[https://archive.org/details/triumphofmoonhis00hutt/page/188 188–189] |year=1999|isbn=978-0-19-820744-3 }}</ref>

Graves believed that one could be in the true presence of the White Goddess when reading a poem, but in his view, this could be achieved only by a true poet of the wild, and not a classical poet, or even a Romantic poet, of whom he spoke critically: "The typical poet of the 19th-century was physically degenerate, or ailing, addicted to drugs and melancholia, critically unbalanced and a true poet only in his fatalistic regard for the Goddess as the mistress who commanded his destiny".<ref>{{cite book |last1=de Lima |first1=Marcel |title=The Ethnopoetics of Shamanism |date=2014 |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |location=New york |isbn=9781349684564 |page=83}}</ref>