ABSTRACT
According to T.S. Eliot’s blurb for ‘Essays’ (Spring 1937), Michael Roberts (1902–48) ‘established himself as the most authoritative critic of contemporary poetry with his “Critique of Poetry”’, and deserved to be called ‘not only a philosophical poet, but a philosopher…’. Equally accomplished as an anthologist, teacher, scientific and social commentator, ecologist, and mountaineer, he took a principal part in establishing the Movement of the 1930s with two watershed anthologies, ‘New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands’ (1932) and ‘New Country’ (1933) – which together distributed over 4,000 copies by 1935. In his Preface to ‘New Signatures’, Roberts commented, ‘Mr. Auden’s “Poems” and Mr. Day-Lewis’s “From Feathers to Iron” were, I think, the first books in which imagery taken from contemporary life consistently appeared as the natural and spontaneous expression of the poet’s thought and feeling’. In addition to ‘Critique of Poetry’ (1934), his works include ‘Poems’ (1936), ‘The Modern Mind’ (1937), ‘T.E. Hulme’ (1938), and ‘The Faber Book of Modern Verse’ (1936). He worked as a schoolteacher for most of his adult life, ending as Principal of the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea, London. In a review of the recently issued ‘Selected Poems and Prose’, by Michael Roberts (ed. Frederick Grubb, 1980), C.J. Fox saliently comments:
The MacSpaundays must have found him an exasperating big brother since, despite his intense concern for solving the grimly obvious ills of the day, he was deeply suspicious of, in his widow’s words, ‘the politics of gesture and emotion, the whole rhetoric of the Left … in so far as they were an easy way out, an excuse for not taking the trouble to know, a refuge from hard thinking, and an escape from a situation’s real complexity’.
(Renaissance Man, ‘PN Review’, 7, 3, 1980, 53)