Michael Roberts (writer)

Michael William Edward Roberts (December 6, 1902 – December 13, 1948) was an English poet, writer, critic and broadcaster, who made his living as a teacher.

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• 1914 showed the disaster which followed when hundreds of millions of people gave the old responses to the old stimuli. Soldiers, and later civilians, saw that 'Honour', 'Courage', 'Patriotism', as they understood them, led to cruelty, lying, and blood-lust on a scale so gigantic that the foundations of civilisation were threatened.
  • “Critique of Poetry”, 1934. Also quoted in Samuel Hynes, ‘’The Auden Generation’’, Random House, 2011.

• The politician manufactures a language - a vocabulary and a rhetoric - which, if you accept it as wholly adequate, leads inevitably to the answers he wants and to the actions he wants. But the prior question is whether the language is adequate to the facts. And as the poet is concerned with making language do new work and finding out the implications of language, his answer is always : no .
  • In Laura Riding (ed,) The World and Ourselves (Epilogue) 1938. Also quoted in Valentine Cunningham (ed.) Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (1986).

• Folly is built on pride, on pride and power,
  And power ends in weariness and duty:
  Even the hooded eagle cannot soar to heaven .
  • "In Our Time", 1939. Quoted in Skelton, Robin, Poetry of the Thirties, Penguin Books, 1963 (pp. 53).

• The poet is always concerned with achieving a balance between the inner and the outer world;it is his business to hold in a single thought reality and justice.
  • Two Alternatives? in ' T E Hulme ',Carcanet Press,Manchester, 1982

• A good work of art reveals something that is in reality.A new metaphor,a new myth,a new type of character,all these reveal a feature of reality for which we previously had no name.
  • Hulme and Modrern Poetry' in ' T E Hulme ',Carcanet Press,Manchester, 1982

• A church that exists in the midst of a non-Christian social order is liable to be influenced through assimilation or reaction by the false ideas of the age..The problem is to cast out the infection and to do this with proper humility.To stand aloof is no remedy,but a form of pride.
  • Religion and Critique of Satisfaction in ' T E Hulme ',Carcanet Press,Manchester, 1982