ABSTRACT
The picture of the self-taught labouring-class poet borrowing a copy of Milton or Burns from some kindly friend or neighbour, and studying it in the odd moments snatched from work or into the night, is a familiar one. Robert Maybee, however, represents a rarer tradition among labouring-class poets: the individual who never masters reading and writing, but whose verses are nevertheless brought into the public domain and the printed tradition by others. Maybee tells his own story, and sets many of his poems amid the autobiographical prose that makes up much of his principal publication, Sixty-Eight Years’ Experience on the Scilly Islands. His father, a native of the Isle of Wight, ran the Peninnis windmill; his mother, herself a poet, came from a well-known Scillonian family and raised a large family of ten children.
