Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems by Lynette Roberts Read Free Book Online

unconfusedly use the language of god-awful confusion’…
     [T]here are a great many small points I’d like to question you about: such as your
     views on how much interrelation of dissociated ideas is possible in a single line
     without bursting the sense… 20
    Graves could hardly disguise his ambivalence. Her reply is remarkable for its self-assurance:
    It is a long heroic poem. I cannot change it; but I believe a stricter technique would have reduced the poem and clarified what I wanted to say. On the other hand
     it would have been less pliable and adventurous and may have constrained that which
     I had purposely set out to do: which is to use words in relation to today – both with
     regard to sound (ie: discords ugly grating words) & meaning. 21
    A similar uncertainty about Roberts’s diction underlies Eliot’s query about ‘Poem’
     (later the opening of Part II of
Gods
): ‘The words
plimsole, cuprite
,
zebeline
and
neumes
seem to exist but I think that bringing them all into one short poem is a mistake’,
     he tactfully suggests in a letter of 24 November 1943. The following month he accepts
     these words, telling her that he is convinced by her reasons – ‘I like your defense
     of your queer words and now accept all of them, but I am still not happy about
zebeline
’. 22 Eliot’s areeditor’s queries, but Graves’s are more obviously grappling with something larger.
     The point of view Graves puts forward in his letter to Roberts is articulated in many
     of his critical interventions, from the
Survey of
Modernist Poetry
(1927) which he wrote with Laura Riding, to the Clark Lectures of 1954. For Graves,
     ‘modernism’ is essentially a fractured response to a fractured world: for all its
     innovative bluster, it is tired, pessimistic and passive. It reveals something of
     Lynette Roberts’s faith in what she was doing that she should have stood her ground
     so single- mindedly against poets of the stature of Graves and Eliot.
    In a review of
Gods with Stainless Ears
, the
Times Literary Supplement
critic complained that ‘the vocabulary needs a chemical glossary’, going on to dismiss
     ‘the contrast between the high tragic tones of the poet and the naivety of her incidents’
     as ‘irresistibly ludicrous’ (16 November 1951). The review is dismissive, but the
     reviewer has a point about the poem’s contrasts: between grandiloquence and something
     altogether more artless or innocent. Tony Conran, in an essay on Roberts in his book
Frontiers in
Anglo-Welsh Poetry
, offers perhaps the most perceptive comment made on what we could call Roberts’s
     contextual lack of context:
    As with other primitives [Conran talks about John Clare and Emily Dickinson] these
     poets’ viewpoint is eccentric to their culture’s literary norm, though perhaps derivable
     from it. The primitive’s isolation is in a sense a reflection of the isolation of
     all modernist art. That is perhaps why Henri Rousseau lived happily beside the cubists.
     But it is not necessarily the same thing as modernism, though most primitives would certainly claim to be ‘modern’.
     Modernists create an environment in which primitives can come to the fore; so much
     so that ‘primitive’ and modernist can often be regarded as two sides of the same coin. 23
    Conran is right, not just in the detail of Lynette Roberts’s place in the poetic tradition,
     but in the more sweeping suggestion he makes about the relationship between the modernist and the primitive. We need not go along with the term ‘primitive’
     – even if Conran is careful to use it in inverted commas – because after all Roberts
     was educated, well-read, artistically trained, and, for all her ‘outsiderness’, moved
     in literary circles, but we can see what he means. We might prefer the term ‘naïve’
     in the specific sense of the naïve painters, the tradition of Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau.
     A painterly poet, Lynette Roberts was herself a