'She Exhibits the Unrepentant Bad Taste Which Belongs to Good Taste in Its Good Sense'

“Most poetry is as poor as most fiction or most biography, or most books. But it is often so aggressively, so conceitedly poor and undistinguished that readers cannot be altogether blamed for not bothering with the new books as they come out, and I am always hesitant to make them try.” 

Tough talk but still true after fifty-two years. Aside from musical composition and performance, chess and higher mathematics, writing first-rate poetry is likely the rarest of human gifts practiced at a superior level. It’s always a surprise and delight when we encounter it. The passage quoted above is how Geoffrey Grigson (1905-85) begins his review of Scorpion and Other Poems, Stevie Smith’s first posthumous collection to be published after her death in 1971. Grigson has a reputation for being a stringent reviewer, intolerant of nonsense, precisely the quality often expressed by critics of Smith’s work. “In some ways, but not in others,” Grigson continues, “Stevie Smith . . . was the kind of poet who might break down such indifference.”

 

The latter half of the twentieth century was a good time for English poetry, which sometimes even became popular and sold well. Consider Smith, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings and John Betjeman, among others. Grigson writes of Smith: “The very easiness or informality of her way could put some people off. Scorpion lightly stings the idea that poetry must be solemn. If she knew that Keats liked dirty jokes (he did) it would not upset her. She was not one for the Poetic Voice. She mixes nonsense and its opposite.”

 

Of “Oh Grateful Colours, Bright Looks!” in Scorpion, Grigson writes, parenthetically, “(one of several poems written in the knowledge that she was soon going to die)”:

 

“The grass is green

The tulip is red

A ginger cat walks over

The pink almond petals on the flower bed.

Enough has been said to show

It is life we are talking about.  Oh

Grateful colours, bright looks!  Well, to go

On.  Fabricated things too -- front doors and gates,

Bricks, slates, paving stones -- are coloured

And as it has been raining and is sunny now

They shine.  Only that puddle

Which, reflecting the height of the sky

Quite gives one a feeling of vertigo, shows

No colour, is a negative.  Men!

Seize colours quick, heap them up while you can.

But perhaps it is a false tale that says

The landscape of the dead

Is colourless.” 

 

In his review of Smith’s Collected Poems (1975), Grigson makes a rare admission for a critic. After saying he now feels a “fuller delight” in Smith’s work, he writes: “I doubt  if she ever felt herself accepted as a poet of bizarre and unassailable accomplishment. I for one should have spoken more loudly and often for Stevie Smith than I ever did.” Grigson then describes “The Fairy Bell” with commendable succinctness -- “funny” – and quotes the first stanza:

 

“A dismal bell hung in the belfry

And clanged a distant tune

And back and forth the bats did fly

Wherever there was room.”

 

I can think of excellent critics we can’t imagine taking Smith seriously, including Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham, but it was Larkin who wrote, “Miss Smith's poems speak with the authority of sadness.” She could never be a critic’s darling. Grigson makes what might be the definitive judgment on her eccentric body of work, both poems and her three novels:

 

‘She parodies both life and poetry (another characteristic of her kind). She is romantic, and guys her romanticism. She exhibits the unrepentant fearless bad taste which belongs to good taste in its good sense, afraid of many things, but never afraid of laying them out, clear, in her unequivocal words. And she never backed from seriousness – expressed in her unserious idiom – when it demanded her feeling or her time.”

 

[Grigson’s Smith reviews, collectively titled “Comedienne, Sad, Glad, and Serious,” are collected in Blessings, Kicks and Curses: A Critical Collection (Allison & Busby, 1982).]