{"id":66374,"date":"2014-02-11T11:58:54","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T16:58:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=66374"},"modified":"2014-02-11T12:43:48","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T17:43:48","slug":"a-chain-on-the-great-feelings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/11\/a-chain-on-the-great-feelings\/","title":{"rendered":"A Chain on the Great Feelings"},"content":{"rendered":"

The deceptively breezy poems of Stevie Smith.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"NPG<\/a>

Photo: Jane Bown<\/p><\/div>\n

Stevie Smith\u2019s playful, carnivalesque poems, tiny on the page but emotionally trenchant, are getting a new life\u2014her Best Poems <\/i>were reissued in December.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s high time. Smith\u2019s work has been nearly forgotten, her books having fallen out of print. She is not, on the surface, tenderly lyrical or feminist enough to court contemporary readers. Born in England in 1902, she enjoyed some popularity in the sixties for oddball performances of her poems, which she often sang, or read with spooky dramatic flair, but she might just have been too original, or too variegated, for any one school of poetry to champion her work. Perhaps she has also been dismissed because she comes off as cold and hard, a person of uncertain likeability: her so-called comic verse roils with death wishes and sneering attacks on other poets. (\u201cLet all the little poets be gathered together in classes \/ And let prizes be given to them by the Prize Asses,\u201d she says in \u201cTo School!<\/i>\u201d) She has been put in with Blake, Coleridge, and Emily Dickinson. Fine company, but Smith is far more varied, unfettered, and disenchanted than all that. Her lines have scope. They contain a high-low mix of childlike diction, plain speech, formal rhymes, and heroic couplets, with a register that ricochets between folk tunes, hymnals, liturgy, nursery rhymes, and lyrical verse. She deliberately set many poems to the tunes of hymns, and sang them as such. Given all the wit and intellect that animate her poetry, why has she been forgotten?\u00a0<\/p>\n

A profoundly independent and, by all accounts, slightly peculiar woman, Smith\u2014born Florence Margaret, and only later Stevie\u2014lived\u00a0in the same house in North London from the time she was three until her death, taking care of an aunt she treasured, without the need to insert a proper man or children into her life. She worked as a secretary in the women\u2019s magazine business for her entire career, which perhaps is why, in her poems and in her letters, she tilts to seeing women as acutely silly. She avoided serious relationships, settling instead into easily reciprocated, caring friendships and a familial bond with her aunt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You could think of Smith as an eighteenth-century poet with twentieth-century disenchantment. A brooding woman who pulls herself together by working in tight forms, Smith has a style that people call idiosyncratic, but I think it\u2019s merely historical. Like her British male contemporaries W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Smith pulled in the verse techniques of an earlier century and used them to ironic advantage. These poets synthesized literary traditions instead of flinging them away wholesale\u2014they were all<\/i> eighteenth century poets of a sort.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just like Pope and Dryden before them, they had rationalist sensibilities and ironic sophistication, and were skeptical of the social order. They borrowed rhythms from traditional meters and forms. And they were known for their wit. But in poetry, wit is in part the product of technical skill: all these poets knew how to manipulate syntax for maximum impact, a technique that dates not to the eighteenth century but to the religious poets of a century earlier, who applied and experimented with meter to express uncertainty and longing. John Donne, for example, slows down the pace in his Holy Sonnets as he struggles with faith, and speeds up to express it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s when Smith is at her most pithy and sardonic that her eighteenth-century influences are in high relief. Her poems are moral satires in the style of Pope, and at her best (\u201cSuburban Classes\u201d), she is as stylish a coupleteer as he was:<\/p>\n

\n

Tell them it\u2019s smart to be dead and won\u2019t hurt
And they\u2019ll gobble up drug as they gobble up dirt.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Smith\u2019s poems fall into two camps: domestic satires and death poems. The satires, often in formal verse, are the most accomplished. \u201cForgot!\u201d has an adroit tension between the form and the emotional curve that runs through it:<\/p>\n

\n

There is a fearful solitude
Within the careless multitude,
And in the open country too,<\/p>\n

He mused, and then it seemed to him
The solitude lay all within;
He longed for some interior din:<\/p>\n

Some echo from the worldly rout,
To indicate a common lot,
Some charge that he might be about,
But oh he felt that he was quite forgot.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s one of Smith\u2019s most masterful poems. \u201cCheer was a duty,\u201d Smith said in her radio play, A Turn Outside<\/i>, and she pinned the blame on her stiff girls\u2019 school, which kept \u201ca chain on the great feelings we had.\u201d Her jolly lines and buttoned-up rhymes shelter an insidious loneliness: \u201cThe solitude lay all within\u201d is genuinely felt, neither silly nor ironic. The structure gives shape to the suffering by providing an orderly space in which to fall apart.<\/p>\n

Smith was a sketch artist, too, and her Thurber-esque doodles often ran alongside the poems in her collections, emphasizing a kind of discomfort. Smith fought to keep these in her books\u2014she saw them as profoundly illustrative, not mere embellishment.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re included in Best Poems<\/i>, which is arranged chronologically, from the publication of Smith\u2019s first book, A Good Time Was Had By All<\/i> (1937), to her last, Scorpion and Other Poems<\/i> (1972), published a year after her death. The book would benefit from an introduction, and it would be helpful to have dates on the poems, especially for those readers who are new to Smith.\u00a0<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Smith was a sharp-witted woman who put her impatience or dismissiveness with nearly everything around her into her poems. Disenchanted with religion (though she liked the ceremony of it), she took a hatchet to the Christian church. She stuck to tight rhymes, as if continuing an English tradition, but she was witheringly mocking.<\/p>\n

With little patience for women\u2019s problems, Smith saw fit to criticize marriage, despite having no experience of it. (\u201cWas it the salt you were looking for dear? \/ Said Dulcie, exchanging a glance with the Brigadier,\u201d Smith writes witheringly in \u201cDrugs Made Pauline Vague.\u201d) Responding to a \u201cgloomy\u201d letter about what was going on in the world, from the writer Naomi Mitchison in 1937, Smith wrote, rather condescendingly, \u201cI think at the present moment you are in a state of mind that hungers for the disasters it fears. If there are these forces of evil, you see, you are siding with them, in allowing your thoughts to panic.\u201d She goes on to say this \u201cworld-worrying\u201d is hubris and that if the worst happens, you will have the strength to meet it if you have achieved peace in your mind. Callously, she lumps Naomi in with the women who send letters to the magazine, who are \u201call so hungry & worrying.\u201d They are \u201cHungry for a nostrum, a Saviour, a Leader, anything but to face up to themselves & a suspension of belief,\u201d she explains, adding, \u201cThey are unhappy too you know.\u201d Then she thanks Naomi for the party invite.<\/p>\n

The institution of marriage certainly didn\u2019t suit Smith personally, but she didn\u2019t think its conventions suited women, period. \u201cHow Cruel Is the Story of Eve\u201d sees Smith approaching something resembling feminism:<\/p>\n

\n

Put up to barter
The tender feelings
Buy her a husband to rule her
Fool her to marry a master
She must or rue it
The Lord said it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Smith also has a distaste for the pressures of child-rearing: \u201cTo carry the child into adult life \/ Is to be handicapped,\u201d she says in \u201cTo Carry the Child<\/i>,\u201d and then promptly turns on the parents:<\/p>\n

\n

The child, too, despises the clever grown-up,\u00a0
The man-of-the-world, the frozen,\u00a0
For the child has the tears alive on his cheek\u00a0
And the man has none of them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem is the lack of genuine feeling in adults, \u201ctrapped,\u201d as we are, \u201cin a grown-up carapace.\u201d Children (\u201cthe poor child, what can he do\u201d) are people she respects.\u00a0While Smith exempted herself from the inequities of marriage and the labor of raising children, she didn\u2019t see the problem with disdaining the married life from a comfortable distance.<\/p>\n

Any longing that might have gone to a man Smith instead projects onto death. \u201cI\u2019m nuts on death really,\u201d she wrote to the Irish playwright Denis Johnston in 1937. Her obsession with death and suicide (she tried in 1953) was less a totally encompassing, Plath-like despair than it was\u00a0 a yearning to explore death\u2014not unlike the way it so preoccupied the eighteenth-century Graveyard School of poets. \u201cMerry death\u201d she calls her baroque obsession, which courses gorgeously through her jaunty lines. True, Smith was in a dreary nine-to-five and lived a suburban life. (\u201cMy life is vile \/ I hate it so \/ I\u2019ll wait awhile \/ And then I\u2019ll go,\u201d begins \u201cThe Reason<\/i>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Sure, she may seem fed up, but she\u2019s not, really. She\u2019s just giving expression to basic human longing in the only way she knows how. If you\u2019re a thinking, feeling poet, you\u2019re going to wonder what the meaning of life is, and it might depress you a little. And if, like Smith, you start off with a religious feeling and then discard it, even if you keep the spiritual dialogue up\u2014which she did, as a practicing Anglican\u2014you\u2019re going to run into some sort of spiritual chasm. (It was the same for Eliot and Auden, though they chose salvation while Smith, disillusioned, was deeply ambivalent about the existence of the afterlife.) On top of that, if you give up romantic intimacy and become an old maid, well, your longing will need to deposit itself somewhere over the course of a lifetime. So Smith longs for death. \u201cTender Only to One,\u201d a kind of love letter, says it straight:<\/p>\n

\n

Tender only to one,
Last petal\u2019s latest breath
Cries out aloud
From the icy shroud
His name, his name is Death.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Centuries ago, \u201cloving\u201d death by way of exploration and religious feeling was much more in style. In a 1957 letter to Anna Kallin, a colleague at the BBC Radio, Smith explained that she was including a lecture, \u201cThe Necessity of Not Believing,\u201d in which she showed how she was religious when young, then wasn\u2019t at all, and then became \u201cconscientiously anti-religious\u201d because it was immoral to believe. Her description of the lecture is a sound description of Smith herself: \u201cIt is not at all whimsical, as some asses seem to think I am, but serious, yet not aggressive, & fairly cheerful though with melancholy patches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith was not so na\u00efve as to think that death was an easy out for life\u2019s difficulties. In a 1956 essay, \u201cToo Tired for Words,\u201d she says, \u201cOne wants that idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired,\u201d she says. The gist of the essay, published in the journal Medical World<\/i> in 1956, three years after Smith\u2019s suicide attempt, is to tell physicians to mollify their beside manner: \u201cTreat your tired patients gently, and do not scold them, for guilt runs with tiredness and a sort of farewell mood too, a desire to go, at all costs to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when your time is<\/i> up, it wouldn\u2019t be so bad to have it end the way Smith puts it in \u201cUp and Down<\/i>\u201d:\u00a0<\/p>\n

I shall be glad when there\u2019s an end
Of all the noise that doth offend
My soul. Still Night, don cloak, descend.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Diane Mehta is a writer in Brooklyn. Follow her @DianeMehta<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The deceptively breezy poems of Stevie Smith. Stevie Smith\u2019s playful, carnivalesque poems, tiny on the page but emotionally trenchant, are getting a new life\u2014her Best Poems were reissued in December.\u00a0 It\u2019s high time. Smith\u2019s work has been nearly forgotten, her books having fallen out of print. She is not, on the surface, tenderly lyrical or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":584,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[12824,2186,12825,657,12826,7030],"class_list":["post-66374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-best-poems","tag-death","tag-florence-margaret-smith","tag-marriage","tag-parenthood","tag-stevie-smith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Chain on the Great Feelings by Diane Mehta<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 11, 2014 \u2013 The deceptively breezy poems of Stevie Smith. 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