Aemilia Laracuen

Aemilia Laracuen (Emelia MacKinley) (1925-2007)

American Artist and Muse of Poet Robert Graves

Aemilia inspired many of Graves’s love poems and was also the illustrator of one of his best-known poetry anthologies, Love Respelt.[1]

Graves was Oxford’s professor of poetry between 1961 and 1966, He 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.

Graves was so besotted with Laracuen that he bought her a house in Puerto Vallarta, 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. Beryl passed away in late 2003.

The correspondence between Robert Graves and Aemilia Laracuen is now being edited by Dr. James Donald Gifford. James is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria.[2]

Aemelia married for the third time and for the last years of her life, after her third divorce, retained her married name Emilia MacKinley. She lived her later years travelling between Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and New York City.