It’s February, the month of St Valentine’s, & yet I’ve chosen one of the least romantic poets I can think of to feature this month in the Weekly Poem series. Who might that be? The great Stevie Smith.
Ms Smith, who has appeared on Robert Frost’s Banjo a couple of times in the past, was British & wrote from the mid 1930s until her death in the early 1970s. Her poetry defies easy categorization—a sort of very much female, very much mid 20th century Alexander Pope might give the uninitiated some sense of her technique & vision.
But Smith was not a “mere” formalist, tho she wrote during a period in which formalism reared its head quite virulently with the work of the “New Critical” poets—writers like John Crowe Ransom, William Empson & Yvor Winters, among many others. Her dark vision didn’t spring from the ivied halls of the academy—for starters—but rather from feeling & experience, even when it can hardly be called “autobiographical” at all (witness today’s poem). Still, some call her work confessional—interestingly enough, the most famous “confessional poet” of all, Sylvia Plath, was a big fan of Smith’s work—but if she is, she takes the art of confession from the landscapes inhabited by Plath or Sexton, or Lowell or Berryman, & makes of it an opportunity for serious play.
In fact, this gift for play—even in the midst of a sometimes mordant darkness—is one of Smith’s great strengths & something that sets her apart from many of the other formal poets of her era. William Carlos Williams once famously attacked the sonnet (& by extension, poem in strict form) as a “fascist” construct. As someone who has written in form myself—even if often reconfigured rather drastically—I’ve thought a lot about that statement since I first heard it quoted by poet Greg Orr around 25 years ago. From my viewpoint, a “form” of poetry—whether “formal” in the usual sense or partaking of the typical constructs of English language free verse as practiced over the past 100 years—becomes “reactionary” when it abandons play. This Smith never does.
“The Bereaved Swan” is an early poem—it comes from Stevie Smith’s A Good Time Was Had By All, published in 1937. Hope you enjoy it!
The Bereaved Swan
Wan
Swan
On the lake
Like a cake
Of soap
Why is the swan
Wan
On the lake?
He has abandoned hope.
Wan
Swan
On the lake afloat
Bows his head:
O would that I were dead
For her sake that lies
Wrapped from my eyes
In a mantle of death,
The swan saith.
Stevie Smith