Stevie Smith
In Our Time: Culture
00:00
The Lonely One in Palmer's Renaissance Art
She was a good performer, made people laugh, crowds came, she became popular. I think of her career as having this U-shape because she begins very high novel on yellow paper and then basically it dips through the 40s and she's at a real low point which is when she writes not waving but drowning. Then it starts to come up in the 50s and she catches this wave of younger poets putting on public readings. You know, poetry reading in public isn't really a thing before the war. And they take her up as this sort of person from a previous generation. But she's a performer, if you hear readings of Smith before an audience, she has them in the
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