Looking Again at Stevie Smith's All the Poems

Stevie Smith's All the Poems is considered by Barbara Berman at The Rumpus. "That she wasn’t especially original makes All the Poems no less piercing to read, in large part because she was so good at exploring emotional neediness. She fell in love with men and women, and her wounds are impossible to conceal," writes Berman. More:

Smith confronted the collective political suffering of her people, and while she was often unlucky in romantic love, she was publicly admired. She was fearless about saying she was afraid, and that helped her make fear tolerable, as it surely must have for her audience. In “The Poets Are Silent,” from Mother, What is Man?, which was published in 1942, she and Sartre share a leaden moment in the face of carnage, though she doesn’t name him or any other writer working at that terrible time:

There’s no new spirit abroad,
As I looked, I saw;
And I saw that it is to the poets’ merit
To be silent about the war.

We are, after all, talking about a poet who had read war poetry by all the greats and some of the unknowns of World War I. Her education also exposed her to earlier war poems by English and French writers, including some who died when they were younger than her. If there is silence, it is not always a failure of morality. It is sometimes an understanding that, to do justice to the subject is an often paralyzing mix of inspirational vision and pain.

“England, you had better go,” she declares in “Voices against England in the Night,” another poem in the volume. We Americans have obviously known terror on our own soil, but we have not faced what devastated England in the past hundred years, and we aren’t likely to. We read Stevie Smith to help us grasp this, and to understand that our century, though very different, will be no less challenging, with its roots in mistakes not of our making :

Basil and Tommy and Joey Porteous who came to our house
Were too brave even to ask themselves if there was any hope.

Read it all at The Rumpus.