Returning to Wales: Lynette Roberts’s poetry in the 1940s
Shipilova Natalia Vitalyevna
Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University of the Humanities
Submitted: 24.11.2023
Abstract. The paper examines the poetry of Lynette Roberts (1909-1995), one of the most significant but little-studied authors of the late modernism era. A native of Argentina and Welsh by birth, in the 1940s, Roberts carried out a creative experiment, trying to reconstruct the Welsh heritage in her lyrical poetry based not only on traditional myth, but also on direct personal experience. This project resulted in the 1944 collection “Poems” analyzed in the paper. The aim of the research is to determine the specifics of Roberts’s 1940s poetry in the context of the poet’s search for her national identity. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the research is the first Russian work to provide a brief overview of the poet’s biography and writings. It is the first time that the key features of Roberts’s poetics have been identified by analysing the most significant texts from her 1944 collection “Poems”. The research findings showed that there is an unusual synthesis of the modernist and the traditional folk perception of reality in Roberts’s poems. The dual nature of the persona’s view is also explained by her contradictory position: she is inside the Welsh tradition as its heir, but at the same time, she observes it from the outside as a person belonging to a different culture.
Key words and phrases: Линетт Робертс, Уэльс, британская поэзия, модернизм, Lynette Roberts, Wales, British poetry, modernism
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