As well as a lyric poet, she's very interested because of going forwards and backwards in time. She has a wonderful set of lyrics where she's kind of thinking about thoughts recollected in anxiety. I think rhyme is a really key thing as well which we've sort of talked about by the side but it's one of her great things along with those metrical tricks. And they're kind of rhymes that most poets wouldn't dare do because they seem almost kind of quite learish or carolite or oversimply. Ogden Nash had his own rhyme about Smith as well.
In 1957 Stevie Smith published a poetry collection called Not Waving But Drowning – and its title poem gave us a phrase which has entered the language.
Its success has overshadowed her wider work as the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry and three novels, mostly written while she worked as a secretary. Her poems, printed with her pen and ink sketches, can seem simple and comical, but often beneath the surface lurk themes of melancholy, loneliness, love and death.
With
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia
Noreen Masud
Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol
and
Will May
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Southampton
The photograph above shows Stevie Smith recording her story Sunday at Home, a finalist in the BBC Third Programme Short Story competition in 1949.