Website review: Stevie Smith - Wikipedia, the free ...
kapka discovered this in Poetry
•1 reviews since Aug 30, 2007
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•en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_Smith
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kapka discovered 12 months ago
Stevie Smith wrote three novels, the first of which, A Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936. All her novels are lightly fictionalised accounts of her own life, which got her into trouble at times as people recognised themselves. Stevie said that two of the male characters in her last book are different aspects of George Orwell, who was close to Smith (there were even rumours that they were lovers; he was married to his first wife at the time). She also wrote nine volumes of poetry. Her first volume of poetry was A Good Time Was Had By All. It was this that established her as a poet, and soon her poems were found in periodicals. Her style was rather dark; her characters were perpetually saying goodbye to their friends or welcoming death. At the same time her work has an eerie levity and can be very funny, though it is neither light nor whimsical. "Stevie Smith often uses the word 'peculiar' and it is the best word to describe her effects" (Hermione Lee). She was never sentimental, undercutting any pathetic effects with the ruthless honesty of her humor. Apart from death, common subjects include loneliness; myth and legend; absurd vignettes, usually drawn from middle-class British life; war and human cruelty; and religion. Stevie Smith could never entirely abandon or accept the Anglican faith of her childhood, and wrote sensitively about theological puzzles: "There is a God in whom I do not believe/Yet to this God my love stretches." Though her poems were remarkably consistent in tone and quality throughout her life, their subject matter changed over time, with less of the outrageous wit of her youth and more reflection on suffering, faith and the end of life...
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