Last month
while scrolling through my Twitter feed I came across a link to an article by Adam Kirsch in The
New Republic titled “The Greatest English Poet you Haven’t Heard of.” This
kind of title never fails to bring me running (or clicking) in the hope of
discovering a writer I’ve been missing out on, someone I will fall in love
with. It reminds me of the time I discovered a dusty copy of Patrick Kavanagh’s
Selected Poems in Dauphine Street
Books or, to go back a little further, the time my cool Aunt Jill, seeing my
twelve year-old self tapping his foot to the latest twee pop album, slipped me a copy of
Peter Gabriel’s Security and said,
“You need to listen to this.” Every
bibliophile has an inbox of books that keeps growing, and I’m no different.
Just knowing that there are words out there to hunt down, unearth, or stumble
upon randomly, and that at any moment someone can add genuine value to my life,
maybe even completely change its course, by offering the unexpected—well, that’s
one of the things that gets me out of bed.
So I was a
little disappointed when Kirsch’s piece turned out to be an introduction to the
poetry of Edward Thomas and, in part, a review of Matthew Hollis’s (partial) biography of Thomas. To be clear, the piece
itself is not disappointing. Kirsch is a fine writer. I enjoy his thoughtful essays on Modern poetry, and this one is
absolutely worth your time, especially if Thomas is a poet you haven’t heard of. But I found Kirsch’s title
puzzling. Thomas is represented in every major anthology of twentieth-century
British literature that I own. He was one of Robert Frost’s dearest friends. Anne
Stevenson, Andrew Motion, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill all admire him as an
important predecessor. R. S. Thomas cut his poetic teeth on Edward Thomas. Ted
Hughes called him “the father of us all.” In short, his was, and remains, a
known voice. Kirsch says as much in the article, pointing out that Thomas, once
he had found that voice, “became one of the most beloved poets of the twentieth
century.” So I was scratching my head a little. I also have quibbles with
calling Thomas an “English Poet” since he was Welsh by blood and much of his
work is motivated not chiefly by a love for the English countryside, as is
commonly assumed, but by hiraeth, as Andrew Webb demonstrates in
his brilliant new book on Thomas.
But never
mind. For the sake of this post, let’s say that an English poet is any poet who
writes poetry in English. I don’t happen to believe this, but I will pretend to
for a moment because even though I was disappointed by Kirsch’s teasing title,
it did lead me to consider just who is,
in my view, the greatest English poet (of the twentieth century, at least—I
didn’t stray into earlier territory) that most people have never heard of, and unless
I broaden that category to include all English-language poets, I can’t use the brilliant poet that keeps asserting herself in my mind.
Of course,
“greatest” is a loaded, subjective term. I think there is as much “greatness”
in Caddel and Quartermain’s Other anthology as there is
in the Oxford staples. Maybe “important” is a better adjective because it’s at
least kind of demonstrable. But
Kirsch uses “greatest,” so that’s what I’m going with. In my estimation, the
most neglected “great” poet of the twentieth century is Lynette Roberts (1909-1995),
a wonderful, difficult poet who was born in Argentina to parents of Welsh
extraction, moved to London as a Spanish-speaking child, and lived in Wales as
an adult. Her work was championed by Edith Sitwell and Dylan Thomas, who was
best man at her wedding. T. S. Eliot thought she was a tremendous writer, and he
published both of her volumes at Faber. Wyndham Lewis (of BLAST fame) championed her work and sketched this image of her.
Like
the work of most Modernist poets with experimental inclinations, Roberts’s work
is uneven, but in the words of Robert Graves, who called her “one of the few
true poets now writing,” “her best is the best.” I view her magnum opus, the heroic Gods with Stainless Ears, as a forgotten
Modernist masterpiece. And yet, outside of Wales, I’ve never met another person
who is familiar with her work. The closest I’ve come is this excellent 2006
piece by John Wilkinson in Boston Review.
Roberts is
a war poet of the home front, and her work blends the inertia of domestic life
in a small Welsh village with an awareness of devastating global conflict. Much of the relatively little writing that does exist on Roberts focuses a bit too much on her failed marriage to the Welsh poet and editor Keidrych Rhys, her mental breakdown, her becoming a Jehovah's Witness, and the fact that she abandoned poetry late in her life. All of this has its place, of course, and it provides a context for her work. But there is certainly not enough focus on her linguistic innovation, the stark originality of much of her work, and the fact that it offers what Katie Gramich calls “an impressionistic evocation of a west Wales enclave becoming a wasteland.” What matters most to me, as a lover of words, is that Lynette Roberts could write poems like this one:
Poem
We must uprise O my
people. Though
Secretly trenched in
sorrel, we must
Upshine outshine the
day’s sun: and day
Intensified by the
falling prism
Of rain shall curve our
smile with straw.
Bring plimsole plover to
the tensile sand
And with cuprite crest
and petulant feet
Distil our notes into
febrile reeds
Crisply starched at the
water-rail of tides.
On gault and greensand a
gramophone stands:
In zebrine stripes
strike out the pilotless
Age: from saxophone
towns brass out the dead:
Disinter futility, that
we entombing men
Might bridle our runaway
hearts.
On tamarisk, on seafield
pools shivering
With water-cats, ring
out the square slate notes.
Shape the birdbox tress
with neumes. Wind sound
Singular into cool and
simple corners,
Round pale bittern
grass, and all unseen
Unknown places of
sheltered rubble
Where whimbrels,
redshanks, sandpipers ripple
For the wing of the
living. Under tin of earth
And wooden boles where
owls break music:
From this killing world
against humanity,
Uprise
against, outshine the day’s sun.
Read that
again, out-loud, and even before you look up all the words and allusions, tell
me the sound alone didn’t just make your life better.
Keith Tuma
included two sections of Gods with
Stainless Ears in his controversial (and I think admirable) 2001 Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and
Irish Poetry (Oxford), and Patrick McGuiness has now edited both Roberts’s Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2005) and her
Diaries, Letters, and Recollections (Carcanet,
2008). Hopefully this will lead to
increased awareness of her work among readers and critics, and not just in
Wales, where, to be fair, it has received attention. In the meantime, imagine that
I’ve just approached you in the aisle of your favorite used bookstore with a
copy of Lynette Roberts’s Collected Poems
in my hand, and that I am handing it to you and saying, “You need to read
this.”