Not Drowning But Waving: Stevie Smith and the Language of the Lake

"Crying: I should write a poem, Can I look a wave in the face If I do not write a poem about a sea-wave,
Putting the words in place."

—Stevie Smith, "Mrs. Arbuthnot"¹

"A queen of contradictions," the modern British poet Stevie Smith remains both in and out of the English canon, without easy resolutions for the dichotomies that have emerged around her. Ironically, perhaps, her plea to remain exempt from the evaluations and judgments prevalent in the oft-anthologized "No Categories!" does little to keep readers and critics from subjecting her to any number of diametrically opposed subject positions. Sanford Sternlicht, writing In Search of Stevie Smith, outlines some of the binaries that bind her:

. . . despite the growing critical attention that Stevie's work is receiving, actually positing the "real" Stevie and locating meanings and values in her writing has become more difficult simply because her stream-of-consciousness prose and her poetic embryos are so widely and so variously interpretable that exegetes clash and contradict. Stevie has been called an essentially public poet employing prosopopoeia to address her audience in several distinct voices including that of a child; an adolescent; a bitter, cynical woman; a theologian; and a philosopher. She has been called a stand-up comic and an ironist, a lyricist, a confessional writer, a closet dissident if that is not a contradiction in terms, a satirist, and a Christian apologist. She has been described as a lover of animals and a hater of children. ... She has been called a masker and a revealer. In the ring ratings of twentieth-century poets, she has been judged a lightweight and a heavy. She has been proclaimed an airhead and an egghead. She has been accused of anti-Semitism and general misanthropy. She has been praised as one of the most musical poets of her generation, and she has been castigated for having a tin ear. She was clearly preoccupied with death, but she lived her life with enthusiasm, even glee. She imagined extravagantly. She was a queen of contradictions, and yet she bombards us with binaries. She was ... well ... Stevie.²

But to be "well, Stevie" reveals many of the interpretive tendencies involved even in her own name. Critics have frequently commented on the striking immediacy and popularity of Florence Margaret Smith's poetry. Some have returned that sense of familiarity by calling her by nickname in scholarship, perhaps partially due to her diminutive stature and seemingly helpless manner, partially due to her increasing tendency later in life to deliver her work in the voice and dress of a schoolgirl, partially due to the play and film about her life, entitled Stevie, and partially due to the poems themselves. Arthur C. Rankin's The Poetry of Stevie Smith: "Little Girl Lost" goes so far as to claim that this is appropriate because Smith is "a special case,"³ while Ingrid Hotz-Davies deplores the way such critics "have felt themselves at home with 'little Stevie. ...' What emerges then is the image of a poet who seems to have never emerged beyond the age of a precocious and at times somewhat naughty little girl."⁴

Certainly, some of her readers have never advanced her work beyond a "precocious but somewhat naughty" dismissal. Alison Light observes that "her verses are as likely to irritate as to amuse":⁵

. . . there is something of Edward Lear and Walter de la Mare about her and both are the kiss of death as far as inclusion in any canon of poetic endeavour is concerned. (The English may love nonsense or light verse but they don't like to be found reading it.) To make matters worse, there are the reams of dotty drawings which Smith doodled in the margins of her work, and, as though to dispense finally with her claims to serious attention, there is...