Michael Roberts (writer)

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For other persons named Michael Roberts, see Michael Roberts (disambiguation).

Michael Roberts (William Edward Roberts) (6 December 1902 - 13 December 1948) was a British poet, writer, critic and broadcaster, who made his living as a teacher. He was born in Bournemouth, and educated at Bournemouth School and King's College London. He in 1922 went to Trinity College, Cambridge to read mathematics, following a custom of the time; it was at this period (to 1924) of his life he acquired the name Michael (after Lomonosov).

He went to teach in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and remained there at the Royal Grammar School until 1941, apart from an interval in London from 1931-34. In the later 1920s he had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain but was expelled within a year. Having published a first poetry collection in 1930, he started to edit anthologies, of which New Country (1933) became celebrated for the group of poets, including W. H. Auden, it featured. In 1934 he took part in a high-profile series of radio broadcasts, Whither Britain?, together with major figures such as Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin. In 1935 he married Janet Adam Smith, critic and anthologist, and fellow mountaineer; they lived in Fern Avenue, Jesmond Newcastle upon Tyne where they were visited by W. H. Auden in September 1937. In 1941 they went to the Lake District when the school was evacuated. There they shared a house with the poet Kathleen Raine.

The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), which he edited, is the single piece of work for which Roberts is now best remembered. He followed it with poetry and prose writing, and a study of T. E. Hulme.

He became a BBC broadcaster during World War II. He died of leukaemia in 1948.

[edit] Poets in New Signatures (1932)

W. H. Auden, Julian Bell, C. Day Lewis, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, John Lehmann, William Plomer, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond

[edit] Poets in New Country (1933)

W. H. Auden, Richard Goodman, C. Day Lewis, John Lehmann, Charles Madge, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond, Rex Warner

[edit] References

• Michael Roberts: selected poems and prose (1980) edited by Frederick Grubb, Carcanet Press.
• "Physics and the Literary Community, 1905-1939" (1994), unpublished Oxford D. Phil. thesis by Michael H. Whitworth: checklist of Roberts's contributions to periodicals, includes items not included in Grubb's bibliography.