Lynette Roberts, whose poetry was championed by T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves, might fairly be claimed to be our greatest female war poet, and her work constitutes one of the most imaginative poetic responses to modern war and the home front in the English language. Her first book, Poems, was published in 1944, with a blurb from Eliot, her editor at Faber:

'She has, first, an unusual gift for observation and evocation of scenery and place, whether it is in Wales or her native South America; second, a gift for verse construction, influenced by the Welsh tradition, which is evident in her freer verse as well as in stricter forms; and third, an original idiom and tone of speech.'

Graves called her “one of the few true poets now writing”; “her best is the best”, he declared, while Eliot praised her poems by that most Eliotic of criteria: that they communicated before they made sense. Dylan Thomas, with his usual waspishness about contemporaries, dismissed her as 'a curious girl, a poet, as they say, in her own right'."

When Roberts died in 1995, aged eighty-six, in a west Wales nursing home, her work had been out of print for nearly half a century, and has gone unregistered in histories of British poetry, even those dedicated to that much-maligned period, “the Forties”. “Oblivion” is too dramatic a word for what happened to her – footnotehood probably captures it better. She features in literary memoirs and correspondence as the wife of Keidrych Rhys, the flamboyant poet and editor of Wales magazine, in the letters of Dylan Thomas (who borrowed Vernon Watkins’s suit to be best man at their wedding), Alun Lewis, Robert Graves and others, and in occasional bibliographies of the period’s poetry. Though always an outsider, she cut a stylish figure on the London artistic scene, and was well connected not just with poets but with artists, photographers and designers. Alun Lewis, with whom she exchanged poems, was captivated, describing her as “a queer girl, [who] wears a red cloak and is unaccountable”. She moved in “New Romantic” and “Apocalypse” circles, encountering poets such as Henry Treece, Kathleen Raine and George Barker, while her husband’s close friendship with Dylan Thomas ensured she saw plenty of literary life’s underside. There are glamorous portraits of her by the photographer Ida Kar, less glamorous ones of her digging her garden in wartime by Douglas Glass (known for his weekly Sunday Times “Portrait Gallery”), and a pencil sketch of her, looking unusually serene, by Wyndham Lewis.

Roberts herself invested little in her reputation, and after the mid-1950s lost all interest in it. After divorcing Rhys in 1948, she lived in a caravan with her two children, Angharad and Prydein, first in Laugharne (the setting for Under Milk Wood, where her address was “The Caravan. The Graveyard. Laugharne”), and then in Bell’s Wood, Hertfordshire. The beginning of the 1950s saw a series of setbacks: financial problems, domestic insecurity, the rejection of her third book by Eliot, and the collapse of various projects, including an art gallery in the Chislehurst Caves. In 1956 she had the first of a number of breakdowns, became a Jehovah’s witness, and abandoned writing. Her last publication was a lively documentary novel, The Endeavour: Captain Cook’s first voyage to Australia (1954).

The work published in her lifetime consists of two books of poetry, Poems and Gods with Stainless Ears (1951), a pamphlet of very short short stories, and uncollected essays on subjects as diverse as Renaissance art, modern farming, and the history of coracles. She reviewed for the TLS and other journals, wrote radio essays on poetry, and her verse play about Welsh colonists in Patagonia, El Dorado, was broadcast on the Third Programme in 1953. She also wrote another novel, the unpublished and recently discovered “Nesta”, written between 1941 and 1943, a “historical novel” about the grandmother of Gerald of Wales. Roberts seems to have thought of Nesta as the one literary enterprise that would bring her some money, and may have tried to emulate Graves, whom she was helping at the time with research for The White Goddess. Graves found her notion of “historical” very different from his own: “Lynette is always breaking in with ‘hoodoo’, ‘frou-frou’, ‘aluminum’, ‘Knossos’, S. America, modern painters and so on”, he complained. Roberts herself paid little heed to the constraints of the genre, warning the reader: “There is little, about two paragraphs in all, that can be said to be authentic . . .”. “A quite extraordinary affair” is how Eliot described it in a 1945 letter, delicately hedging his bets before deciding not to publish it.

Roberts was born in Buenos Aires a hundred years ago this past July. Her family, of Welsh descent, were wealthy expatriates, and though her father was head of the Argentine Railways, she was no heiress. Dylan Thomas was being hopeful when he described her as coming from “rich Welsh parents in South America (oil-diving or train-wrecking)”, because by the time she settled in Britain she was far from rich, and suffered plenty of what she herself called “that dylanesque problem – no money”. Though she put down roots in Wales, Roberts always considered Argentina to be her home, and her daughter remembers: “while she was dying, in rural Wales, she kept reverting to Spanish – though not her first language it was the language of her childhood. At one point we needed a dictionary to understand her”.

Roberts, a talented painter, studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in the 1930s, trained under Constance Spry, and set up a flower arranging business in London. She was briefly engaged to Merlin Minshall, the amateur racing driver and spy who once worked as Ian Fleming’s secretary and claimed to be the model for James Bond. She dropped him for Keidrych Rhys, whom she met at a Poetry London party organized by Tambimuttu in 1939. She describes agreeing to marry Rhys with the laid-back impetuousness she appears to have reserved specially for life-altering decisions: “He was charming and spoke like a prince”. Dylan Thomas remembered the wedding as “distinguished mostly by the beauty of the female attendants, the brown suit of the best man, the savage displeasure of Keydrich’s mother, & Keidrych’s own extremely hangdog look & red-rimmed eyes”.

The couple moved to Llanybri, a village on the Tywi estuary, in October 1939, and it was here that Roberts wrote her finest and most original work. She kept a diary and recorded the fretful, laborious tedium of a woman’s life in wartime. Occasional visits to and from the literary world only heighten that sense of her life’s unmeeting ends: hearing Louis MacNeice read in London she finds him “bastard-looking” but with “excellent delivery of sinewy and satirical verse”; Cecil Day Lewis by contrast is “like a temperate book on a shelf”. We also get, in 1946, an early sighting of R. S. Thomas, whose first book was published by Rhys’s Druid Press, starting as he meant to go on: “a gloomy sort of person – who like most intelligent ministers today doesn’t believe in the church he preaches”. Lynette’s diary, with its humour and attentiveness to landscape and community, became the raw material of her poems, providing quotidian incidents which her poetry projects on to legendary or mythic backdrops. Her poems are inhabited by the myths and legends associated with the Welsh landscape, but not in what she called the “nauseating” Celtic Twilight way. Instead they are updated and modernized: a sort of machine-age Mabinogion. Roberts ranges freely over other myths too: as the girl in Gods with Stainless Ears waits for her soldier lover the hills become “Homeric”; when she mends his clothes on a Singer sewing machine, she is transformed into a futuristic Penelope waiting for her Ulysses, here not named but numbered: 1620B64, Rhys’s army number.

The Roberts–Rhys ménage was never going to be without incident, and her first diary entry, less than a month into their marriage, sets the tone:

"Keidrych enjoyed his lunch; he looks very unpleasant today. Debauched, with his four-day beard, he is busy scratching behind me writing to Kilham Roberts asking if the Literary Society will grant us some money to live on . . . . Today Keidrych frequently found cinders or grit in his stewed apples. I told him poets must always expect pieces of chimney in their dishes, that is their fate. He laughed and said what he usually does, “You ought to be filmed.” His ears are scarlet and I hate him, he is always chewing humbugs."

Lynette’s first contact with Eliot came when she was trying to promote her husband in a wifely way. Eliot asked her to send some of her own work, and his editorship was patient, tactful, supportive and occasionally baffled, as when he responded to her variegated diction with this masterpiece of graceful understatement: “The words plimsole, cuprite, zebeline, and neumes seem to exist, but I think that bringing them all into one short poem is a mistake” (letter of November 24, 1943). Poems begins with “Poem from Llanybri”:

If you come my way that is . . .
Between now and then, I will offer you
A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank
The valley tips of garlic red with dew
Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank

In the village when you come.
At noon-day I will offer you a choice bowl of cawl
Served with a “lover’s” spoon and a chopped spray
Of leeks or savori fach . . . .

“Poem from Llanybri” first appeared in 1941, in Tambimuttu’s Poetry London, and again in Keidrych Rhys’s Faber anthology, Modern Welsh Poetry, in early 1944. Like many of Roberts’s poems, it is imagined as spoken, and the opening italics seem to take their cue from a remembered fragment of direct speech – perhaps a conversation left hanging, waiting to be resumed: “If you come my way that is . . .”. Though there is nothing in the text or notes to indicate it is addressed to anyone specific (and part of its effect is that it feels directed at the reader opening the book) it was originally written for the Welsh soldier-poet Alun Lewis, with whom Lynette had a close friendship. Lewis’s own poem for Roberts was “Peace” in his collection Raiders’ Dawn (1942), and in a long and erratically typed letter of 1941 Roberts tells him: “My poem is real ie true of the everyday things that I do. Yours is mythical. I love all myths, dream prose faraway things that we can only touch with minds. What of them Alun they are not life but to me as necessary as life”. When the poem first appeared Lewis was one of the most promising poets of his generation; by the time Roberts’s Poems came out he had died, probably by his own hand, in Burma on March 5, 1944 – around the time when Roberts and Eliot were discussing the final composition of her book. He was twenty-eight.

“Poem from Llanybri” is all the more moving in that the invitation, launched into the future, is never taken up, or at any rate not by its addressee. This dynamic portal to the book is darkened by death, those future- powered verbs caught in limbo: “Can you come? – send an ode or elegy / In the old way and raise our heritage”. Reading it knowing its background brings to mind the relatives of soldiers killed in action receiving letters from their loved ones after the Home Office telegram notifying them of their death, or of those letters from wives and parents returned unopened with the dead man’s belongings.

Roberts writes about how war reaches into life on the Home Front: indirectly, piecemeal, through rumour and hearsay. This is given a striking visual correlative in her poem “Earthbound”, where the woman hears about the death of a local boy and sees the reflection of a van, presumably carrying the body, caught in the glass of her make-up mirror: “I, in my dressing gown, / At the dressing table with mirror in hand / Suggest my lips with accustomed air, see / The reflected van like lipstick enter the village . . .”. Roberts’s poems are full of images of reflection and refraction, of shiny surfaces (chrome, glass, steel, aluminium) rendering intense but fractured images of the world. She is interested in film and radio, not just for their narrative potential but for their capacity to add a jarring, discontinuous element to narrative. In Gods with Stainless Ears she writes filmic effects into the verse, as when a close-up of a woodpecker tapping indicates machine-gun fire, or the swooping birds of Llansteffan bay become aircraft, their “new beaks scissoring the air”. She imagines a near future where people “attend films of poetry with unseen voice as opposed to the poetry reading”, and in the preface to Gods with Stainless Ears, she writes “the scenes and visions ran before me like a newsreel . . . the poem was written for filming”.

Though Roberts wrote most of Gods with Stainless Ears (subtitled A heroic poem) in the early 1940s, it did not appear until 1951. Eliot encouraged her to work instead on shorter pieces, finding Gods fascinating but “stiff going”. In the end he suggested she include a section of it at the end of Poems, and so “Cwmcelyn” was the last poem in her first book. After the gentle welcome of “Poem from Llanybri”, the reader of 1944 finishing Poems with this:

Air white with cold. Cycloid wind prevails.
On ichnolithic plain where no print runs
And winter hardens into plates of ice;
Shoots an anthracite glitter of death
From their eyes – these men shine darkly.

With stiff betrayal, dark suns on pillow
Of snow; but not eclipsed, for our cauterized
Craters, a conclave of Architects with
Ichnographic plans, shall bridge stronger
Ventricles of faith . . .

might feel they had experienced a kind of accelerated poetic time travel. “Cwmcelyn” and “Poem from Llanybri” are set in the same places, among the same people and in the same wartime context. Yet all seems different. Here the writing is jagged, abrasive, impersonal, but also technical and vatic in its mode of address. There is no speaker, or not yet, and the scene is unmistakably futuristic in its glittering bleakness. Where the book’s first poem spoke of “the old ways”, this one draws on a new kind of language, launching itself into a technological age. “Poem from Llanybri” imagined a future, but as a future private encounter; the future alluded to here is collective, the voice public, the dimension epic. By the time “Cwmcelyn” appeared in the very different literary and social context of 1951, as the opening of Part V of Gods with Stainless Ears, it is part of a narrative poem at once mythic and futuristic in scope, for which Roberts provides fourteen pages of notes, translations and explanatory material. As is traditional with notes to modernist poems post-Waste Land, Roberts’s are often as Delphic as the lines they claim to elucidate.

Gods with Stainless Ears might be described as a local modernist epic. It was all but complete nearly a decade before it appeared in full, and existed in a draft that Eliot saw in 1942 or 1943. By the time it was published Roberts had updated it and, on Eliot’s advice, inserted prose “arguments” at the start of every section. She had updated the language too – it became more nuclear-age, and perhaps more ambivalent about technology. Roberts had also divorced Rhys, and this partly explains the pessimism of the “arguments”: the last section is set in “The same bay plated with ice” with “Industrial war progressing . . .”. The girl and her soldier lover separate, and she “turns away: towards a hard and new chemical dawn breaking up the traditional skyline”, alone. In the poem, however, they are together, the images are of verticality and uplift, leading to a sort of science fiction assumption:

We by centrifugal force . . . rose . . . rose softly . . .
Faded from bloodsight. We, he and I ran
On to a steel escalator, the white
Electric sun drilling down on the cubed ice;
Our cyanite flesh chilled on aluminium

Rail. Growing taller, our demons diminishing
With steep incline. Climbed at gradient 42º . . .

What is most remarkable about Lynette Roberts’s poetic trajectory is its compression. Little more than a decade of writing, but also of hardship and isolation, in which four or five years alone produced two books of poems, a novel, a diary and dozens of essays and articles. In fact it is so compressed that it may not be a “trajectory” at all, or a “development”, or any of those other terms critics use to measure out the relationship between time and change in a writer’s work. Just as in her poetic world-view heroes of the Gododdin are reiterated in a wartime village on the west Wales coast, so in her writing the old and the new are contemporaneous. As she puts it in Gods with Stainless Ears, her subject is “today which is tomorrow”. In June 1948 she went with her children to see Eliot at the Faber offices. In a recently published account of the visit Roberts describes explaining to Eliot the options she felt were open to her as a writer. What she tells him illuminates more than just her own work but also tells us something about a whole generation of writers coming out of war; about

"returning to the elemental words and simple voices of living – ie basic rural cultures, earth rhythms . . . what we will be forced back to if that atom war arises. A cleansing purity and rebirth of sound, recreation, refolding of the world such as we had the refolding of the various strata, Icelandic stone and bronze age etc. And . . . hitting against that view which is one of isolation, severe pruning, the whole discordant universe, the cutting of teeth, one rhythm grating against another, the metallic convergence of words, heavy, colourful, rich and unexplored."