Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Jennings
-
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.
qtd. in
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.
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...
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...
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
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.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The poet Elizabeth Jennings
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
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...
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. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
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,...
GC
has contributed poems to more than half a dozen journals, Welsh, English, and American, and most frequently to Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Review, and Poetry Nation Review (PNR). She has reviewed...
White, Cynthia L. Women’s Magazines 1693-1968. Michael Joseph, 1970.
90
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Spawls, Alice. “Does one flare or cling?”. London Review of Books, Vol.
38
, No. 9, 5 May 2016, pp. 40-2.
1944: The quarterly magazine Outposts (described...
Writing climate item
1944
The quarterly magazine Outposts (described by poet Elizabeth Jennings
as that great encourager of young talent) began publication.
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985.
100
1951: The title of Leslie Allen Paul's memoirs,...
Writing climate item
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 anthology Poets of the 1950s...
Writing climate item
14 January 1956
D. J. Enright
's anthology Poets of the 1950s brought together work by eight poets generally taken to be leading voices in the recently-catagorized, modern but anti-modernist Movement.
Collini, Stefan. “Self-Positioning”. London Review of Books, Vol.
31
, No. 12, 25 June 2009, pp. 17-19.
17
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Faber and Faber, 1993.
273
1998-9: In a league table of sales in verse for these...
Writing climate item
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.