'The Self-Appointed Guardian of English Literature'

One is always in danger of being perceived as a fuddy-duddy. Speak admiringly of rhyme in poetry or elegant prose in fiction and risk being called a reactionary (which I was just yesterday) or an old fart (which happened last week). Stevie Smith diagnoses the type in “Souvenir de Monsieur Poop” in her second collection, Tender Only to One (1938). Her poem begins: 

“I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature,

I believe tremendously in the significance of age;

I believe that a writer is wise at 50,

Ten years wiser at 60, at 70 a sage.”

 

Smith wrote that the year she turned thirty-six. Age has little to do with such things. There are youthful prodigies and late bloomers among writers and readers. It’s not a matter of combatting the prevailing critical and popular fashions. It’s more a matter of articulating one’s standards for work new or old that compels us to reread it.   

 

“But then I am an old fogey.

I always write more in sorrow than in anger.

I am, after all, devoted to Shakespeare, Milton,

And, coming to our own times,

Of course

Housman.”

 

There are worlds of hard-won irony in those lines. Later in the poem Smith writes: “(When I say that I am an old fogey, I am, of course, joking.)”