Writers & Their Work S.
1 total work
This study of Stevie Smith's writing concentrates on her poetry but pays proper attention also to her prose writing. A large number of poems are examined in detail, and in such a way as to provide keen insight into the subtleties of her apparently ingenuous poetical technique. These close readings also add up to an exploration of the themes that underlie her briskly odd and unique style of wit. Smith's work, dipping into tradition while remaining untrammelled by it, is placed in relation to other English poets, male and female, whose writing is not in the owlish academic mainstream. Her mode of writing, in its richly irreverent and sceptical eccentricity, is shown to be fundamentally linked to basic aspects of the poetical imagination and the means of its production.