Stevie Smith
In Our Time: Culture
The Fate of School
She hated school. She said that she was tired all the time, and to do well at that school you had to sort of drive yourself on. The main thing that she talks about in her interviews is how whenever they did something wrong, they were given a passage of Catullus to learn by heart. That sort of thing makes its way into her later poetry. There's a wonderful anecdote where she describes a painting, of all the animals flocking to the ark. But there's one animal who's going the wrong way, and Smith says the animal has looked at the ark and decided not to go. And she said, I'm that animal. You know, I take
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