Stevie Smith
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Stevie Smith was a British poet and radio personality (September 20, 1902 - March 7, 1971)
Born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, when three years old she moved with her mother and sister to Palmers Green, London. Later when her mother became ill her aunt Lion came to live with them. She was educated at Palmers Green High School and North London Collegiate for Girls. She spent the remainder of her life with her aunt and worked as private secretary to Sir Neville Pearson with Sir George Newnes at Newnes Publishing Company in London from 1923 to 1953. She never married.
She wrote three novels, the first of which, A Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936. She also wrote nine volumes of poetry. Her first volume was A Good Time Was Had By All. It was this that established her as a poet, and soon her poems were found in periodicals. Her style was rather dark; her characters were perpetually saying goodbye to their friends or welcoming death. "Stevie Smith often uses the word 'peculiar' and it is the best word to describe her effects" - Hermione Lee.
She was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1966 and won the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry in 1969. She died of a brain tumor on March 7, 1971.
Her best known poem is the autobiographical "Not Waving but Drowning" which explores the fundamental isolation of the poet from her audience via the medium of a misapprehension relating to a swimmer dying at sea.
After Smith's death, her collected poems and three novels were republished, and there was a successful play based on her life, Stevie, written by Hugh Whitemore. It was filmed in 1978 by Robert Enders and starred Glenda Jackson and Mona Washbourne.
Fiction
- Novel on Yellow Paper (Cape, 1936)
- Over the frontier (Cape 1938)
- The Holiday (Chapman and Hall, 1949)
Poetry
- A Good Time Was Had By All (Cape, 1937)
- Tender Only To One (Cape, 1938)
- Mother, What Is Man? (Cape, 1942)
- Harold's Leap (Cape, 1950)
- Not Waving But Drowning (Deutsch, 1957)
- Some Are More Human Than Others: A Sketch-Book (Gabberbocchus, 1958)
- Selected Poems (Longmans, 1962) includes 17 previously unpublished poems
- The Frog Prince (Longmans, 1969) includes 69 previously unpublished poems
- Two In One (Longmans, 1971) reprint of Selected Poems and The Frog Prince
- Scorpion and Other Poems (Longmans, 1972)
- Collected Poems (Allen Lane, 1975)
- Selected Poems (Penguin, 1978)
External links
- Document source: McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa (http://www.lib.utulsa.edu/Speccoll/smiths0I.htm)
- Stevie Smith reading "Not Waving But Drowing" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/smith.shtml)
- British Library page for Stevie Smith (http://www.bl.uk/collections/britirish/modbrismith.html)