Stevie Smith

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Standard Name: Smith, Stevie
Birth Name: Florence Margaret Smith
Nickname: Peggy
Nickname: Stevie
Pseudonym: S. S.
SS , publishing in the mid twentieth century, was a poet who is hard to categorise. All of her works—poetry, novels, stories, essays, reviews, a radio play, and her inimitable drawings— have a quirkiness, a pretence of naivete which masks an unyielding and uncomforting view of life. All of them, too, are based on her own life and the lives of her friends: the last characteristic brought a number of difficulties like resentment and threats of libel actions.
Photograph of a circular blue English Heritage plaque in the brick wall of Smith's "house of female habitation" in Palmers Green. It reads: "Stevie Smith, 1902-1971, Poet lived here 1906-1971."
Black-and-white photo of Stevie Smith sitting in a park, 1954. Looking off-camera, she wears a white top, her arms are crossed in front of her, and she holds a li cigarette in her hand.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Elaine Feinstein
EF wrote her first poems at play, while she bounced tennis balls against the garage door. When she showed one to a teacher and it appeared in the school magazine, she became hooked for life...
Textual Production Elizabeth Jennings
A later selection was issued by the same publisher under the same title, in 1970, edited by Stevie Smith . EJ followed this volume for Batsford by editing The Batsford Book of Religious Verse, 1981.
Textual Production Vera Brittain
She had prepared herself for bad press on this account; however, she did not expect quite the level of fierce condemnation the book did receive. Among those who harshly criticized it were Lorna Lewis and...
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
MW has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jeni Couzyn
Her brief essay on Stevie Smith stresses originality, and also the omnipresence in Smith's poems of Death, as a presence not avoided but courted. Her even briefer piece on Sylvia Plath notes the tendency of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Fleur Adcock
Again her introduction is interesting and trenchant. She observes that the early twentieth century already feels remote. Her selection runs from Charlotte Mew (born in 1869) to a clutch of women a little over thirty:...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Seamus Heaney
He begins here with short pieces about his childhood reading and moves on through his development as a poet, paying tribute to Philip Hobsbaum as an influence. He puts forward the idea that his poetry...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Patricia Beer
Some of PB 's technical experimenting is playful. In Memory of Stevie Smith sums up its tribute in an echo of its subject's rhythms: A heroine is someone who does what you cannot do /...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Philip Larkin
The central subject is the period which saw the rise of modernism and its assimilation—or not—into the native English tradition,
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Faber and Faber, 1993.
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a tradition represented here by poets from Housman , Hardy , and William Barnes

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Texts

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