SHE was the most important muse in the life of the poet and writer Robert Graves, whose fictional life of the Roman emperor Claudius was filmed for a BBC drama series, writes Richard Brooks.

Now, nearly 40 years after Aemilia Laracuen’s relationship with Graves ended, she has spoken about their bizarre love affair.

Laracuen, 73, who lives in New York, where she is in very poor health, inspired many of Graves’s love poems and was also the illustrator on one of his best-known poetry anthologies, Love Respelt.

Graves, who was Oxford’s professor of poetry between 1961 and 1966, fell for the American Mexican when she was 30 years old and he was in his mid-sixties. After meeting in New York, Graves persuaded her to come to live near him in Deia on Majorca even though he had a home there with his wife Beryl.

“Poor man, I loved him and he tried so hard,” said Laracuen. “I didn’t really want him, but I couldn’t let him go. He called me his goddess. At first I thought it was a joke or a game. Then it became real. For him, his belief was like a religion.”

Graves, whose fame grew with the publication of The White Goddess in 1948, become convinced that he needed a female muse to inspire his work. Judith Bledsoe and then Margot Callas initially filled that function, though neither, it seems, played any sexual role.

“But Aemilia was different,” said Miranda Seymour, whose official biography of Graves was published in 1995, 10 years after his death. Seymour was, like other biographers, not allowed to talk to Laracuen, who is particularly despised by Graves’s eldest son, William. “Aemilia was dangerous as she took Graves for a ride. She also took money off him,” said Seymour.

Looking back at her relationship with Graves, Laracuen talked about how they even “invented” a child. Their sexual relations were not good and very irregular mainly because Graves, whose first world war memoir Goodbye to All That was his earliest literary success, suffered from a very bad prostate problem.

Graves was so besotted with Laracuen that he bought her a house in Mexico. And yet she took a lover, the beat poet Howard Hart, to live there.

In 1967 Laracuen left Graves for good. Yet no sooner had she gone than his family virtually fixed him up with another muse, 17-year-old Juli Simon. “Yes, I felt a pang of jealousy and I knew he had gone forever from me,” said Laracuen.

All that remains to unravel are the hundreds of Graves’s letters to Laracuen, which she sold to the University of Victoria in Canada in 1969. Under an agreement with the Graves family, they were not to be read until his widow Beryl had died. She passed away in late 2003.

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