When Stevie Smith was five she was diagnosed with TB and sent away to a salatorium in Kent for treatment. She returned at the age of eight and that's when she begins her formal schooling. 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. And that sort of thing makes its way into her later poetry. But then she went to some very high-powered schools. Well she hated school. She said that she was tired all the time. When she leaves school as a teenager she doesn't go on to further education. She goes on to Secretarial School. So we go from
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.