Lynette Roberts

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lynette Roberts (4 July 190928 September 1995) was a Welsh poet, born Evelyn Beatrice Roberts in Buenos Aires to parents of Welsh extraction. She came to London while still young. She settled in Wales in the 1940s, where she painted and had poetry published by Faber and Faber (Poems (1944), Gods with stainless ears: a heroic poem (1951)). At that time she was married to the poet Keidrych Rhys, and living a difficult life in Llanybri. She had two children with him; they divorced in 1949.

The Endeavour: Captain Cook's first voyage to Australia (1954) was a prose work. Later in life, she repudiated her work and refused to permit it to be reprinted. An edition of her collected poems was issued by Seren Press after her death but immediately withdrawn because of legal problems with the Roberts estate; a new Collected Poems finally appeared in 2006 from Carcanet, edited by Patrick McGuinness

She is the dedicatee of Robert Graves' The White Goddess in its first edition, and provided much of the Welsh material used by Graves.