How do you make the life of a poet work on screen? It helps if they had scandalous personal lives (Rimbaud and Verlaine in Total Eclipse, Dylan Thomas in Last Call and The Edge of Love). Robert Graves was last seen on the sidelines of Terence Davies’s biopic as the friend of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon (Benediction). Now the tables are turned, with a cameo of Sassoon in a film about the early career of the man who would go on to become professor of poetry at Oxford and to win the Queen’s gold medal for poetry.
Graves is an unfashionable figure today, known chiefly through I, Claudius, the TV serialisation of two of his novels, starring Derek Jacobi as the Roman emperor. But he regarded himself first and foremost as a poet, memorably declaring that “prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat” – a line that William Nunez, writer-director of The Laureate, reluctantly had to excise from his script because none of the show dogs had yet been born in the years he chose to cover.
