Lynette Roberts

Lynette Roberts (4 July 1909 – 26 September 1995) was a Welsh poet, born Evelyn Beatrice Roberts in Buenos Aires to parents of Welsh extraction.

Contents

Life

She moved to London while still young, where she studied at the Central School for Arts and Crafts (now part of Central St Martins College of Art and Design). 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)).

Roberts married the poet Keidrych Rhys at Llansteffan, and lived with him in relative poverty, compared with what she was used to, at Llanybri, the village immortalized in her "Poem from Llanybri". The poem was addressed to another poet, Alun Lewis, to whom Roberts confessed to being attracted.[1]

Lynette Roberts and Keidrych Rhys had two children (a daughter, Angharad, in April 1945, and a son, Prydein, in November 1946); they divorced in 1949.

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

Writing

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 An edition of her collected poems was issued by Seren Press after her death but immediately withdrawn because of legal problems with the Roberts estate; a new Collected Poems finally appeared in 2006 from Carcanet, edited by Patrick McGuinness. A volume of miscellaneous prose[2] – diaries from her time in Llanybri, correspondence with Robert Graves, memoirs of the Sitwells and T. S. Eliot, an essay on "village dialect" and short stories – appeared in 2008. An unpublished novel, Nesta, written in 1944, is apparently lost (but see TLS article of 6 November 2009, which indicates that it has been discovered).[3]

Bibliography

Writings by Lynette Roberts

Criticism and biography

References

  1. ^ A Poet's Guide to Britain
  2. ^ volume of miscellaneous prose
  3. ^ One of our greatest war poets: Lynette Roberts

External links