Michael Roberts's
Collected Poems, edited by his widow Janet Adam Smith, contains nearly all of the poems he published from 1931 onwards, along with a selection from his first volume,
These Our Matins(1930), and some late, previously unpublished poems.
The early poems are predominantly philosophical arguments cast in stanzas and regular metres. “Time and the Crystal Image” echoes T. S. Eliot's “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”, while “Perspective” draws upon Herbert Read's neo-metaphysical “Equation”. Even where Roberts writes in the first-person singular, he eschews affective discourse: the “I” of “Midnight” registers the stars through the window, but gives little indication of what he felt; the exception is the personal lyric, “Poem for Elsa”. Through images
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Citation: Whitworth, Michael. "Collected Poems". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 March 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5944, accessed 24 November 2024.]
