Marxist Poet

Michael Roberts is likely to be best known for his editing of the first Faber Anthology of Modern Verse, and for a few poems on mountaineering. His poetry is representative of a mood and a political direction which has already dated a little:

The bowed head bends in wisdom over the ancient text;
Outside, men are talking about jobs,
The women keep an eye open for a smart coat,
The children press their noses on shop-windows . . .

page 347

If one could forget the hot baths, the official dinners,
The wives of the eminent financiers, one might begin.
But the text is corrupt, and poverty has no grammar;
Someone has heaved a brick through the dusty window.

It is perhaps unfair to illustrate his work by a quotation from a propa- gandist poem. But a certain propagandist rigidity disfigures the majority of the poems in this book. The curt, exact and pseudo-oracular statement is seen as only a paper lantern when the candle of Marxist enthusiasm is removed. Fortunately Michael Roberts had two very different sides to his nature, as his wife has made clear in a well-controlled Introduction – on one side the brilliant Leftist schoolmaster who ‘expected people to stretch themselves rather more than they had any wish to’; on the other, a passionate mountaineer who dedicated his second book of poems to his wife and to an Alpine guide, who found in climbing a mystical knowledge of the Logos (though he would never have used the term) immanent in created things:

But here, where desire is crucified on splintered fact,
The mind accepts its form and finds its freedom,
The invisible wild tree of knowledge burning
In vivid light . . .

Significantly these lines occur in an elegy for fallen climbers. The ecstasy and release are always very near to the moment of death – ‘their eyes are ringed with flame, their fingers bleed. . .’. It is a perilous deification, and strange from the pen of the Marxist schoolmaster.

1958 (175)