Evelyn ('Lynette') Beatrice Roberts (4 July 1909 – 26 September 1995) was a Welsh poet and novelist. Her poems were about war, landscape, and life in the small Welsh village where she lived. She published two poetry collections: Poems (1944) and Gods with Stainless Ears: A Heroic Poem (1951). Roberts' work was admired by many poets, including: T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Robert Graves. In later life, Roberts had a mental breakdown and stopped publishing. Her work was largely forgotten for the remainder of her life. She died in 1995. to Cecil Roberts and Ruby Garbutt, both Australians of Welsh descent. Cecil Roberts was a railway engineer, who worked as General Manager of the Buenos Aires Western Railways. The family enjoyed an affluent lifestyle, owning "yachts and racehorses". They lived in relative poverty. During the next 10 years, Roberts worked on her poetry. She began a professional relationship with poet T.S. Eliot, who was an editor at Faber Publishing and became friends with the poet Robert Graves. During this decade, Roberts a produced "an extraordinary and unique body of work". She gave birth to two children toward the end of the war, a daughter, Angharad, born in 1945, and a son, Pridein, born in 1946. In 1949, Roberts and Rhys divorced.

In Llanybri, Roberts painted, wrote poetry and raised her family. In 1944 her collection Poems were published by Faber and Faber. She immortalised her village in her "Poem from Llanybri". This poem was addressed to the poet, Alun Lewis, to whom Roberts confessed to being attracted. In 1944 and 1945 drafts of Robert Graves's The White Goddess were published in Keidrych Rhys's periodical, Wales. Roberts was the dedicatee of Robert Graves's The White Goddess in its first edition (1948), having provided much of the Welsh material used by him. Faber and Faber published her Gods with stainless ears: a heroic poem in 1951. Her documentary novel, The Endeavour: Captain Cook's first voyage to Australia was published in 1954.

A volume of miscellaneous prose, 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 An unpublished novel, Nesta, written in 1944, is apparently lost.

Selected publications

Poetry collections

  • Poems (1944)
  • God with Stainless Ears: A Heroic Poem (1951)
  • Collected Poems (2005)
  • Diaries, Letters, and Recollections (2008),

Other publications

  • 1944 – An introduction to village dialect: with seven stories (The Druid Press)
  • 1954 – The Endeavour: Captain Cook's first voyage to Australia (Peter Owen)

References

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  • 'Lynette Roberts - our greatest female war poet ?', BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour, 30 March 2006 (Audio archive. Accessed : 22.03.08)
  • Patrick McGuinness, 'Rediscovering a Modernist Classic: Lynette Roberts (1909-1995)', Transcript: European internet review of books and writing, no.22
  • John Wilkinson, 'The Brain's Tent: Lynette Robert's Collected Poems, (Boston Review, Sept/Oct 2006)