“Our Greatest Female War Poet”
She was “our greatest female war poet” and yet today almost no one has heard of Lynette Roberts. Her poetry was championed by T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves, and according to Patrick McGuinness in this week's TLS, “her work constitutes one of the most imaginative poetic responses to modern war and the home front in the English language.”
Her first book, Poems, was published in 1944, with a blurb from Eliot, her editor at Faber. Graves called her "one of the few true poets now writing"; "her best is the best," he declared, while Eliot praised her poems by that most Eliotic of criteria: that they communicated before they made sense.
But when she died in 1995, aged 86, in a west Wales nursing home, her work had been out of print for nearly half a century, and has gone unregistered in histories of British poetry, even those dedicated to that much-maligned period, "the Forties." "Oblivion" is too dramatic a word for what happened to her—footnotehood probably captures it better, writes McGuinness, whose edition of her diaries may help to rekindle interest in a remarkable woman.
Afghanistan’s Natural State
Afghan leaders are making a fool of those who want to be their friends. As Alex de Waal describes this week, there is nothing abnormal, or even irrational, in their choosing a process of government that shares among themselves the financial fruits of foreigners’ fears. He cites the book Rebuilding War-Torn States by former U.N. economist Graciana del Castillo: "in Afghanistan most political figures saw the state as a redistributive instrument, funded by foreign donors, to build power through patronage networks." Not only does this approach come with the blessing of tradition, de Waal argues, it remains "well suited to those borderlands of the global system where local resources are too scarce to sustain a state based on a domestic tax base." Fortunately for foreigners still ambitious to rebuild war-torn states, the prospects for El Salvador, Kosovo, and Iraq are judged much better.
The Precious Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo von Hofmannsthal was a literary prodigy whom even his sharpest Viennese critics considered a great writer. He was an aesthete and collector of fine porcelain who, according to Paul Reitter in the TLS, saw his lyricism as strangely related to the reality of the stock-market crash of 1873. Von Hofmannsthal is best remembered now as the librettist of Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier. As described in J.D. McClatchy's book The Whole Difference, he was also a Jewish writer who promoted the peasant culture of the Austrian Volk in order to alter his public image.
Plus: Check out Book Beast for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.
Peter Stothard is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was editor of The Times of London from 1992-2002. He writes about ancient and modern literature and is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.
