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RADAR Research Archive and Digital Asset Repository RADAR Research Archive and Digital Asset Repository Desiring to bear the word: the poetry of Stevie Smith Valerie English (2005) https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/01d5e644-1e1e-4388-9303-372f14e115f4/1/ Note if anything has been removed from thesis: Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this work, the full bibliographic details must be given as follows: English, V (2005) Desiring to bear the word: the poetry of Stevie Smith PhD, Oxford Brookes University WWW.BROOKES.AC.UK/GO/RADAR DESIRING TO BEAR THE WORD: THE POETRY OF STEVIE SMITH Valerie English, B.A., M.A. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University, March 2005. 2 ABSTRACT This thesis argues that Stevie Smith's poetic style can be attributed to her gender. It shows that the dominant status of masculine poetry and poetics, and the prejudice against women poets, affected Smith's poetic style and led to her search for the source ofa feminine poetic voice. The prevailing circumstances when Smith began to publish poetry are examined in order to establish Smith's socially appropriate poetics. The thesis offers detailed textual analyses, informed by feminist theories. Chapters one and two take a socio-historic materialist approach to examine the problems confronting Smith as a woman poet. This includes considering Smith's categorisation as a poet of the suburbs, and the dominance of the Auden group. Chapters three to five look at Smith's use of children's literature and the influence of Blake and Wordsworth. Judith Butler's ideas ofperformativity, and Carolyn Steedman's of interiority, are used to propose that both are relevant to Smith's preoccupation with childhood. Smith's engagement with, and subversion of, the male poetic tradition and the idea of the muse are also considered. The last two chapters on the themes of birth and death draw on the ideas of Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva in order to argue that Smith's longing for death is a wish for rebirth, therefore a return to the maternal semiotic source which facilitates poetry. In this way death does not withhold language, but enables linguistic acquisition. This thesis adds to existing knowledge about Smith, and extends debates surrounding women and poetry. It contributes to feminist analyses of fairy tales, the poetic tradition, and the idea of the muse, and expands psycholinguistic theory to propose the relevance of death 3 as well as infancy, and to suggest that Smith's preoccupations with the source of feminine poetry anticipates some fundamental theories of the 'French' feminists. 4 CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 5 Preface 6 I. 'The hysteria of masculine agape': the context of 14 poetry in the 1930s 2. Eccentricity, the suburbs and the pastoral 55 3. Feminine Poetics I: the influence and significance 101 of children's language and nursery rhymes 4. Feminine Poetics I: interiority, innocence, creativity 124 and the influence of Blake and Wordsworth 5. Feminine Poetics II: fairy tale traditions 154 6. Feminine Poetics II: the search for the mother 183 7. Feminine Poetics II: death and rebirth 215 8. Conclusion 245 Bibliography 254 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many librarians have given me help during this project, including those at the British Library, the London Library, Oxford Brookes University, Texas A & M University, the McFarlane Library at the University of Tulsa, Washington University in St Louis, and the local history department of the Borough of Enfield. I am indebted to Dr Steven Matthews for h is suggestion of the 1930s case study, and to my supervisor, Dr Lynnette Turner, for her unfailing support and guidance. I would also like to thank my family. especially Jim, Adam. and Miranda, for listening to my ideas and never allowing me to give up. Finally Charles \vho. despite being my own Person from Porlock, has clarified my ideas about the semiotic chora. This is for him, and his future. 6 PREFACE Stevie Smith (1902-1971), English poet, spinster and eccentric, published three novels as well as numerous prose works and articles. Ilowever she is principally known as a poet. Poetry was her preferred medium, and although she was forced into writing novels as a means of getting her poetry published, Smith maintained that '[t]here is no strong distinction between what is poetry and what is prose.' I This view blurs the distinction between the two genres and partly justifies her habit of inserting poems within the novels, essays and plays, as well as revealing that, for Smith, descriptive prose can be another version of poetry. Although this project is concerned with Smith's poetry, her own view that 'there is little difference' between it and prose also gives me the justification to use Smith's prose where appropriate, since she otten used the medium to expand on ideas that are present in her poems. Despite Smith's preference for writing poetry, her poems reveal an ambivalence about the genre itself. Indeed, in the highly self-reflexive poem, 'The Word' (1971), Smith writes 'I fear the Word, to speak or write it down, / I fear all that is brought to birth and bom,2 thus voicing her anxieties about the genre of poetry, which she 'fears' both to speak and write. This thesis will examine some of the reasons for her anxieties. In particular, the idea current in the 1930s that serious poetry was, properly, a masculine prerogative; and further ideas that led to her categorisation and marginalisation as both a woman poet and a poet of the suburbs. Smith's light and non-serious poetry, derived from oral and children's literary forms, appears to react to and confront these ideologies. The playfulness of her poetry gave her a voice and a recognisable poetic persona. Yet to take these poems at their face value is to overlook the serious concerns that her work engages with; concerns such as theology, the social position of women, the English poetic tradition, and her own search for a feminine source of poetry. Smith may 'fear all 7 that is brought to birth and born' but she does desire to bear the word, and this thesis will trace her own search for a feminine source of poetry. In the nineteen seventies, after Smith's death from a brain tumour in 1971, both Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney wrote reviews of her poems. These reviews serve as examples of near-contemporaneous receptions of her work, as well as showing that Smith's distinctive poetic style was problematic for those who were looking for serious poetry. Thus it is a mark of Smith's importance as a poet by this time that in 'Stevie, Goodbye' (1972) Larkin considers her to be 'a writer of individuality and integrity, who had perfected a way of writing that could deal with any subject, and a tone of voice that could not be copied.') But that very individuality clearly troubles Larkin as a reader, for he argues that '[s]he showed her heart by blurting things out, artlessly, in afaux na{f style,.4 Larkin's assessment suggests that Smith's work was spontaneous, uttered thoughtlessly and 'artlessly' rather than crafted, and therefore neither seriously conceived nor considered. In 'A Memorable Voice: Stevie Smith' (1976) Heaney also focuses on Smith's individuality, deciding that: One is tempted to use words like 'fey', 'arch', and 'dotty' when faced with her Collected Poems and yet such adjectives sell Stevie Smith's work short. These odd, syncopated, melancholy poems are haunted by the primitive and compelling music of ballad and nursery rhyme, but it has been transposed by a sophisticated and slightly cosseted poetic ear into a still, sad drawing-room music[.f Clearly Heaney, like Larkin, finds Smith's idiosyncratic style, with its borrowings from popular culture and seeming lack of seriousness, difficult to categorise, and this leads him to decide that it is adopted because of poetic inadequacy: "the style, the literary resources are not adequate to ... [that which] we sense they were designed to express.'6 Heaney makes no mention of Smith's femininity, but gender may have some bearing on the assumptions beneath his judgements, for (as this thesis will show) ballads and nursery rhymes are traditionally associated with women, moreover, transposing them 8 into a "drawing-room' associates them with a feminine territory. I will argue that Smith's style, rather than being due to poetic inadequacy, can be both a means of visibility and a strategy that permitted her participation in the male dominated genre of poetry. Moreover, it is an expression of her own feminine poetic voice. Following these early criticisms of Smith, there have been two general trends in Smith scholarship of the past two decades: the biographical and the feminist. Jack Barbera and William McBrien's Stevie: A Biography a/Stevie Smith (1985) and Frances Spalding's authorised biography, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (1988), focus principally on Smith's life, using analyses of the poems illustratively, so that biography and poetry are aspects of each other. Both therefore follow the tendency, particularly in readings of women's poetry, to assume that poems can offer direct and unmediated access to the poefs psyche.
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