Elizabeth Jennings

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Standard Name: Jennings, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Joan Jennings
EJ was a twentieth-century English poet writing on family, literary, and religious subjects. Peter Levi calls her maybe the last poet of what may be called the soul.
The Ship. St Anne’s College.
92: 54
Early in her career she was identified as being part of the Movement, along with other young Oxford poets like Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin . She found this label problematic.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Jo Shapcott
JS was, with Helen Dunmore , U. A. Fanthorpe , and Elizabeth Jennings , one of the four poets featured in no. 5 of the audio-cassette series The Poetry Quartets, issued today by the...
Anthologization Fleur Adcock
From early in her career FA was an insightful critic as well as a poet, and her judgements were already informed by a matured understanding of the shaping force of gender. Dannie Abse included her...
Friends, Associates Kathleen Raine
In later years, KR had a circle of friends at Cambridge which included C. S. Lewis , Edwin Muir and his wife Willa , Elizabeth Jennings , Owen Barfield , A. C. Harwood , Tom Henn
Friends, Associates Anne Stevenson
In Oxford AS met a number of other poets: John Wain , Anne Ridler , Elizabeth Jennings , Anne Born , Andrew Motion , Craig Raine , Peter Levi , and Anne Pennington , who died a few years later.
Contemporary Authors, Autobiography Series. Gale Research, 1984.
9: 284
Intertextuality and Influence Christina Rossetti
CR was mourned in a sonnet by Michael Field shortly after her death. Her influence extended to many other poets of her own time or close to it, including Gerard Manley Hopkins , Rosamund Marriott Watson
Intertextuality and Influence Germaine Greer
The chapters are headed with quotations ranging eclectically through the international canon and counter-canon from Sophocles and The Ramayana of Valmiki (an ancient Indian epic) to Spike Milligan , via Charles Baudelaire , T. S. Eliot
Literary responses Edith Sitwell
This was praised by British Book News, which rejoiced to find ES 's astonishing verbal dexterity employed in her later work upon themes of ever-increasing profundity . . . . She is a poet...
Literary responses Carol Ann Duffy
Elizabeth Jennings praised CAD 's dexterity with language, that glorious juggling which poets sometimes achieve with a sense of surprise even to themselves.
Duffy, Carol Ann. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1994.
152
The book won a Somerset Maugham Award, intended to fund travel...
Literary responses Willa Muir
WM characterised this book as very like a Scotch bun . . . because it has a bit of everything in it, not classified into layers like a respectable English cake.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The poet Elizabeth Jennings
Reception Philip Larkin
Anthony Thwaite edited PL 's Collected Poems in 1988 and his Selected Letters, 1940-1985, in 1992. Andrew Motion published a biography in 1993.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Both Alan Bennett and Martin Amis have edited selections of Larkin's...
Textual Features Germaine Greer
Women are a minority here, but well represented: Fleur Adcock , Anna Letitia Barbauld , Amy Clampitt , Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) , Emily Dickinson , Freda Downie , U. A. Fanthorpe , Vicki Feaver
Textual Features Alice Meynell
AM 's subtle, meditative, poetic style shares characteristics with other religious women writers, looking back to Christina Rossetti and forward to Elizabeth Jennings . She disliked praise of her writing as feminine, preferring this...
Textual Features Ruth Padel
RP takes the journey as the most central of all poetic images. The first part of her book is a guide to reading poetry, divided under headings of which many include the words journey,...
Textual Production Anne Ridler
This collection contained contributions from poets, artists, and musicians to the celebration of the nine hundredth anniversary of Winchester Cathedral. Humphrey Clucas , Clive Sansom , Leslie Norris , Elizabeth Jennings , Peter Levi ,...
Textual Production Penelope Shuttle
The first book that affected PS deeply was Brontë 's Jane Eyre, with whose protagonist she identified.
Steffens, Daneet. “Penelope Shuttle”. Mslexia, No. 33, pp. 46-8.
48
At fifteen she read T. S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson and conceived a wish to be...

Timeline

1 January 1916
The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast in Hanover Square, London.
1944
The quarterly magazineOutposts (described by poet Elizabeth Jennings as that great encourager of young talent) began publication.
1951
The title of Leslie Allen Paul 's memoirs, Angry Young Man, provided the term Angry Young Men, applied in newspapers and then by critics to a group of largely working-class, socially rebellious, young...
14 January 1956
D. J. Enright 's anthologyPoets of the 1950s brought together work by eight poets generally taken to be leading voices in the recently-catagorized, modern but anti-modernist Movement.
1998-9
In a league table of sales in verse for these years, published by the Guardian in October 2000, Ted Hughes was the highest with 172,174, Seamus Heaney second with 34,690, and Carol Ann Duffy third...

Texts

Jennings, Elizabeth. “A poet’s love”. Times, p. 21.
Jennings, Elizabeth. A Sense of the World. A. Deutsch, 1958.
Jennings, Elizabeth. A Way of Looking. A. Deutsch, 1955.
Jennings, Elizabeth. A Way of Looking. Rinehart, 1955.
Jennings, Elizabeth. After the Ark. Oxford University Press, 1978.
Jennings, Elizabeth, editor. An Anthology of Modern Verse, 1940-1960. Methuen, 1961.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Celebrations and Elegies. Carcanet, 1982.
Pitter, Ruth, and Elizabeth Jennings. Collected Poems. Enitharmon Press, 1990.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Collected Poems. Editor Mason, Emma, Carcanet, 2012.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Collected Poems 1967. Macmillan, 1967.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Collected Poems, 1953-1985. Carcanet, 1986.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Consequently I Rejoice. Carcanet, 1977.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Every Changing Shape. A. Deutsch, 1961.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Extending the Territory. Carcanet, 1985.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Familiar Spirits. Carcanet, 1994.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Growing-Points. Carcanet, 1975.
Jennings, Elizabeth. In the Meantime. Carcanet, 1996.
Jennings, Elizabeth, and Peter Roberson. Let’s Have Some Poetry!. Museum Press, 1960.
Jennings, Elizabeth, D. J. Enright, Robert Greacen, John Hewitt, David Holbrook, Robert Nye, and Derek Stanford. “Letter to the Editor: Human Image Debased”. Times, p. 13.
Jennings, Elizabeth, Dannie Abse, J. G. Ballard, George Barker, Bernard Bergonzi, John Betjeman, Malcolm Bradbury, Alan Brownjohn, Charles Causley, Bob Cobbing, George Sutherland Fraser, John Fuller, Roy Fuller, Helen Gardner, Robert Gittings, Ian Hamilton, Jacquetta Hawkes, Norman Hidden, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Laurence Lerner, Cecil Day-Lewis, Naomi Lewis, Edward Lucie-Smith, Adrian Mitchell, Sasha Moorsom, Thea Musgrave, Norman Nicholson Norwich, William Plomer, Peter Porter, James Reeves, Alan Ross, Vernon Scannell, Humphrey Searle, Jon Silkin, Charles Percy Snow, R. S. Thomas, Anthony Thwaite, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Walker, Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, and Hugo Williams. “Letters to the Editor: Future of Radio”. Times, p. 11.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Lucidities. Macmillan, 1970.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Moments of Grace. Carcanet, 1979.
Jennings, Elizabeth, and Anne Ridler. Poems. Fantasy Press, 1953.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Poetry To-day, 1957-60. Published for The British Council by Longmans, Green, 1961.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Praises. Carcanet, 1998.