Stevie and 'a la mode' poets
Stevie wrote to L P Hartley in 1955 that it was necessary to be ‘a la nowadays in poetry... a la Eliot, Spender etc. and soon I fear a la Dylan’. Dylan Thomas, for his part, once complained that it was ‘tasteless’ to schedule Stevie to read her poetry at a fund raising affair.  A la mode poets did not rush to welcome Stevie as one of them.

Poets pass by
Although many of her friends were writers, she didn’t have many personal connections of note with other poets of the day. She did know McNiece and corresponded with him, and she also corresponded with Osbert Sitwell. She crossed paths with other poets of the day, at the Edinburgh Festival of 1965 a film crew making a documentary of the festival went into pub and

‘recorded the phenomenon of Stevie and Auden singing hymns together' 

But she noted ‘I don’t think Auden liked my poetry very much, he’s very Anglican’  

She was agnostic, although she said there was always the danger that she might lapse into belief. She wrote in 1968 that she could not accept the doctrine of hell for unbelievers, and that,

 I threw away the sweetness of Christianity and remembered the harsh bones that lay beneath, and I said: It is immoral.

Stevie and T S Eliot
Stevie’s agnosticism made unsympathetic to TS Eliot’s religious stance. In 1958 she wrote a review of Murder in the Cathedral, and although Stevie found much to admire she wrote that :

one thinks that Mr Eliot believes his terror-talk of cat-and -mouse damnation, and that with him it’s not a case of having to have some terror about in order to make things more exciting, as seems sometimes to be the case with his fellow religious terror writers. But it seems curious, condemnable really, that so many writers of these times, which need courage and the power of criticism, and coolness, should find their chief delight in terrifying themselves and their readers with past echoes of cruelty and nonsense.

I do not know of any criticism by T S Eliot of Stevie Smith's work.

Stevie's unfashionable humour
One might say that Stevie’s poetry is not without its echoes of cruelty and nonsense, and despair and death feature prominently, but there is, to counteract this, something bracing about her poems. They are often dark, but she does not, in my estimation, sink into the ‘delight’ of terror, despair and death for its own sake, she confronts them because they exist and so must be confronted. She is not too proud to use any weapon at her disposal against terror, and humour is a very effective weapon. Humour as a coping strategy is well known to soldiers, medical students and doctors. It is not a strategy much used by ‘serious’ twentieth century poets, it's something that was perfectly understood by the team that made the TV series ‘Mash’.  Stevie is often relegated to the level of Odgen Nash, even though his amusing poems can be read once, and that’s that, while I find that Stevie’s can be read again and again for new meanings.

Philip Larkin's ambivalence
Philip Larkin was interested in her work. In an article, Frivolous and Vulnerable, written in 1962, he told how he found her collection of poems Not Waving but Drowning in a bookshop, and was sufficiently impressed to buy copies for his friends for Christmas. He goes on to say that this caused surprise, his friends

‘were I think, bothered to know whether I seriously expected them to admire it. The more I insisted that I did, the more suspicious they became. An unfortunate episode.’

He disapproved of the fact that her poems were accompanied by drawings (the hallmark of frivolity ), and that she had published a book about Cats ( casts a shadow over the most illustrious name), but went on to say that her poems had two virtues,

‘ they are completely original, and now and again they are moving’ and ‘ Miss Smith’s poems speak with the authority of sadness. He also wrote : ‘It is typical of Miss Smith to see something poetic move where we do not, takes a pot shot at it and forces us to admit that there was something there, even though we have never seen anything like it before.’

Larkin, then, took her seriously, up to a point.

Sylvia Plath  'a desperate Smith addict'
One poet who admired her was Sylvia Plath. In an article in the London Magazine Sylvia was asked what living poets continue to influence her and she had replied

‘ The poets that I delight in are possessed by their rhythms as by the rhythms of their own breathing. Their finest poems seem born all-of-a piece, not put together by hand: certain poems in Robert Lowell’s life studies, for instance, Theodore Roethke’s greenhouse poems: some of Elisabeth Bishop and a great deal of Stevie Smith.’

Sylvia wrote to Stevie in November 1962,

 ‘I better say straight out that I am addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith addict’

she told Stevie that she was hoping to come to London with her babies, and asked in advance if Stevie would come to tea when she had settled in

‘ to cheer me on a bit. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.’

Stevie wrote hoping that Sylvia’s move went well so that they could meet, although she confesses to reading hardly any contemporary poetry, and by inference, that she did not know Plath’s work. Sylvia committed suicide in February 1963 and they never met.

Stevie and feminist writers
Stevie has been claimed as a feminist writer but she does not fit easily into this category. Her review of one of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist books was blunt:

‘ Miss de Beauvoir has written an enormous book about women and it is soon clear that she does not like them and does not like being a woman.’

Stevie wrote that the differences between male and female poets are best seen when the poets are bad:

 Bad women poets are better characters, they seldom... get drunk ... go to prison ... shoot the pianist. Their faults are soul fullness and banality. They like to commune (who does not) with the deity, nature, and themselves, but their words do not quite carry the traffic ... some bad men poets can persuade people ... that tricks and shocks are a substitute for talent ... good poets of either sex are above these quarrels.

Admitting to female inadequacies and proclaiming that for the best poets gender is almost irrelevant is not the usual feminist stance.

Can Stevie carry the traffic
Seamus Heaney, in an essay entitled A Memorable Voice, talks of her

'variety and inventiveness, much humour and understanding, and a constant poignancy... Death, waste, loneliness, cruelty, the maimed, the stupid, the trusting - her concerns were central ones, her compassion genuine and her vision almost tragic

but then declares that :

I suppose in the end the adjective has to be eccentric ... And finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the sombre recognitions ...

( in his opinion, maybe, a second rate female failure to carry the traffic ).

Playing poetic games
However Heaney, like Larkin and Dylan Thomas, wrote in a different mode, and I believe that their judgements and those of other contemporary poets and critics could be coloured by their view of what is the right way to write poetry and what poetry should be. In spite of their judgements, or lack of them, on Stevie's work, many readers find that Stevie’s poems do move them profoundly, and that it is enchanting and invigorating to play her games. These qualities matter more to 'Smith addicts'  than her refusal to ‘play the game’ according to the rules of other poets, and are more important than the question of whether she is an ‘important’ poet.

A strong communication
In her essay on the Muse, written in 1960, she writes,

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

Stevie emerges from the dark
These words suggest to me that poetry is not a network like a spiders web that connects famous and important poets, but is something more like a fungus, whose main body is underground and invisible. It appears above ground in the shape of poets, which grow like mushrooms from the hidden network of its body. Stevie grew strongly from this body, and her poems, like all other poetry,  are part of the beginning and end of all poetry.

Sources
The quotations  come from: Stevie Smith, a Critical Biography, by Frances Spalding, published by Faber in 1988 and republished in 2002, Stevie, a Biography of Stevie Smith by Jack Barbera and William McBrien, published by William Heinmann Ltd in 1985 and now out of print, Me Again, Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith, published by Virago Press in 1981 and also out of print and In Search of Stevie Smith edited by Stanford Sternlicht and published in 1991 by Syracuse University Press, New York.

 Anne Bryan

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If you want to quote from this essay for course work or assignments you are welcome to do so as long as you attribute the work to Anne Bryan and this web site.

  If you aren't familiar with Stevie’s poems give yourself a treat and buy Stevie Smith’s ‘Collected Poems’ available in American bookshops or on www.amazon.com or, as a second best, buy the ‘Selected Poems’, available in UK bookshops or from amazon.co.uk.