Dorothy Roberts
Dorothy Roberts was a Canadian poet born on July 6, 1906, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, known for her deep connection to the natural landscapes of her home province. Raised in a culturally rich environment, being the daughter of esteemed nature poet Theodore Goodridge Roberts, she was exposed to literature and the arts from an early age. After attending the University of New Brunswick, she worked as a reporter and later focused on raising her two children while occasionally contributing to women's magazines. In the mid-20th century, she rekindled her passion for poetry, publishing four volumes over a decade that explored profound themes such as the tension between the physical and spiritual worlds, time, and mortality. Her writing style is characterized by spare lines and metaphors drawn from nature, reflecting both her heartfelt emotions and intellectual inquiries. Although her work achieved limited recognition, it resonated with a dedicated audience, particularly in the Penn State arts community, where she was active for nearly fifty years. Roberts passed away on June 23, 1993, leaving behind a body of poetry that intertwines the material and the spiritual, inviting readers to contemplate the complexities of existence.
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Subject Terms
Dorothy Roberts
Poet
- Born: July 6, 1906
- Birthplace: Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
- Died: June 23, 1993
Biography
Dorothy Roberts was born July 6, 1906, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, her father the much-honored nature poet Theodore Goodridge Roberts. Although her childhood was unusually peripatetic—she lived at different times in England and France as well as Ottawa and near Toronto—Roberts would later draw on the rugged natural landscape of her Maritime Province home for much of her poetic inspiration.
Roberts attended the University of New Brunswick for two years (1926-1928) before accepting a position as a reporter for a Fredericton newspaper. In 1929, she married an English professor and, over the course of the next decade, devoted her time to raising two children. She did occasionally write fiction for women’s magazines, lightweight stories of domestic dramas. Her husband’s teaching appointments moved Roberts from stints in Toronto to Ithaca, New York, and ultimately to State College, Pennsylvania, in 1945. The campus of Penn State was where Roberts would settle for close to fifty years, becoming in the process an integral part of that university’s arts community, sponsoring poetry readings and encouraging creative writing among Penn State undergraduates.
In the mid-1950’s, Roberts turned to her own writing, specifically poetry, her first love (she had published a modest chapbook of children’s verse in 1927). Over a ten-year span, Roberts published four volumes of poetry that found only a limited (if appreciative) audience. Much like the philosophical poetry of Wallace Stevens, Roberts’s verse, its line spare and undecorated, uses the metaphors of the natural world to speculate about dense and unresolvable questions about the tension between flesh and spirit, the mysterious intrigue of infinity, the inevitable collapse of the physical form subjected to the relentless pressure of time, and the fluidity of the natural world and how alienating such a dynamic can appear for those who long only for stability. Thus central to Roberts’s verse is the evident tension between her feeling heart, open to the available wonders of the immediate world, and her fierce intellect, restlessly sorting through that material to find its wider implications. Such metaphysical speculations, however, are always grounded in the available material reality of the natural world of Roberts’s childhood in New Brunswick. Its imagery—trees, sunlight, islands, sunsets—gives her verse its bracing organic solidity while at the same time reassures her readers that the fragments and splinters of the familiar world are part of a grander scheme, a wider sensibility. For Roberts, the natural world is avenue toward confirmation of a rich spirituality.
After a summary volume of her collected verses appeared in 1976, Roberts devoted her attention to her community arts work in the Penn State area. Although her poems were anthologized and she was accorded some degree of recognition from Canadian literary societies, her work largely maintained a modest profile. She died June 23, 1993. In a slender body of poetry, Roberts created a voice that effortlessly fuses the natural and the spiritual. She found in the material world a symbolic environment that sustains probing questions about the very nature of time, mortality, and art itself.