[1] Graves argues that "true" or "pure" poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and her son.

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.

Relying on arguments from etymology and the use of forensic techniques to uncover what he calls 'iconotropic' redaction of original myths, Graves argues for the worship of a single goddess under many names, an idea that came to be known as "Matriarchal religion" in feminist theology of the 1970s.

Graves wrote: Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all around his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline of a forbidden island without actually committing himself to a declaration that it existed.

[4] Graves derived some of his ideas from poetic inspiration and a process of "analeptic thought", which is a term he used for throwing one's mind back in time and receiving impressions.

By applying this methodology Graves decoded a woodcut of The Judgement of Paris as depicting a singular Triple Goddess[5] rather than the traditional Hera, Athena and Aphrodite of the narrative the image illustrates.

[15] Hilda Ellis Davidson criticised Graves as having "misled many innocent readers with his eloquent but deceptive statements about a nebulous goddess in early Celtic literature", and stated that he was "no authority" on the subject matter he presented.

[15] In response to critics, Graves accused literary scholars of being psychologically incapable of interpreting myth[17] or too concerned with maintaining their perquisites to go against the majority view.

Some Neopagans have been bemused and upset by the scholarly criticism that The White Goddess has received in recent years,[18] while others have appreciated its poetic insight but never accepted it as a work of historical veracity.

In an interview, Garner has referred to the book as "that most infuriating gold mine of imagery, The White Goddess, which I understood with great clarity on the fifth reading.

The novels Sign of the Labrys by Margaret St. Clair, Flesh by Philip José Farmer, and The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, were all inspired by the concepts in The White Goddess.