Stevie Smith and Monsieur de Poop (feat. Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Michael Longley and Hera Lindsay Bird)

Poetry Godparents: Some are More Human than Others

The gang’s all here. (Photo via The Marius Petipa Society © CNCS/Pascal François)

I couldn’t read or write poetry, but nor could I leave it entirely behind. Like a lapsed Catholic, I’m steeped in it to the bone, whether I like it or not. Behind the back-yard frog: Marianne Moore; behind the park fox: Ted Hughes; behind the stray cat: Stevie Smith. In one version of ‘Poetry’, Marianne Moore describes ‘true’ poems as ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’. Hughes’s poem about creative inspiration (the irritating old devil) is called 'The Thought-Fox’. Hughes seems never to have suffered writer’s block. On the contrary, like the Alan Partridge of poetry, he had hundreds of ideas.

Poetry hack: always carry a dictaphone notebook

I once saw a long list of topics for poems Hughes had given to Sylvia Plath. Most struck me as too fleshed-out to be of use to anyone but himself (‘Dancers coming down a street, each one more unbelievably dressed than the next’).¹ But I do have to give him credit for the stirrings of ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’ a miraculous poem, which Plath began as an exercise suggested by Hughes to describe the pre-dawn scene outside their bedroom window. Here are the first three lines:

‘This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. / The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God’

Hughes’s ‘exercise’ seems to have kicked in some of Plath’s fine art training. Plath was used to making quick observational sketches for her botany or fine art classes, with annotations that might read something like, ‘the trees are black … the light is blue.’² The strong verticals and horizontals in ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’ as well as the geometric forms and expressive use of colour, and the focus on perspective and pictorial flatness, all take the poetry somewhere it had not been before.

Learning to be quiet

Plath was nowhere to be seen on any reading list for my mid-1990’s MA in poetry. Marianne Moore, on the other hand, was one of the allowed women. Moore wrote poems like ‘Silence’ (‘The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence but restraint’). She cut her poems ruthlessly, rejected much of her own work (‘Omissions are not accidents’), and was an absolute cow to Sylvia Plath: top marks all round.

Moore told Plath that her poems were ‘grisly,’ that she was ‘too unrelenting,’ and let it be known (Queen of England-style), that she was displeased that Plath had sent a carbon copy of a poem rather than typing it out fresh (‘typing is such a bugbear’).³

Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali. Via Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/did-you-know-marianne-moore-and-muhammad-ali-wrote-a-poem-together/

I know I’m being unfair to Moore. She’s hardly the first or last person to find Plath a Bit Much, and there is plenty to admire in Marianne. She was at least as eccentric as Stevie Smith, collaborated with Muhammad Ali, and wore a three cornered hat, for goodness sake.⁴ And it wasn’t just Moore; reticence was the key theme of the MA, or so it seemed to me. In one seminar, a tutor held up Michael Longley’s Gorse Fires and impressed on us the fact that this was Longley’s first book for ten years. Ten years! He had published nothing for ten years!

Gorse Fires has some great poems and I’m very glad to have been introduced to it,⁵ but the reverence for Longley’s decade of silence made an even more lasting impression. Hesitancy, self-censure and silence seemed to be the ideals — all very well for confident, male Oxbridge graduates like our lecturers (who did, perhaps, need this lesson); but not for us state-educated young women cowering under the weight of the canon, and the musty, ivory-tower masculinity of academia.

Stevie Smith saves the day

That particular miasma is dramatized nicely by Stevie Smith in ‘Souvenir de Monsieur Poop.’ This poem kept me going through the sloughs of academia. A ‘self-appointed guardian of English literature,’ Monsieur de Poop believes, ‘tremendously in the significance of age.’

He really is a crashing old bore. The pacing of his list of admired authors (a very predictable list) is perfection:

Monsieur de Poop slows down for dramatic effect. He’s hearing himself being urbane and nonchalant; he’s practised this. The litany ends with ‘Housman’ on a note of very satisfying bathos — not at all the speaker’s intention.

But it’s not all fun and games; there’s a kind of violence in ‘of course’. It’s what I think of as a very English, not very passive, aggression. ‘Of course’ appears reasonable, but to dispute the claim it’s shoring up would require insistence. To question ‘of course’, we would need to be strident; we’d likely appear angry and unreasonable — ‘Come, come, it’s common sense, we all agree. How uncouth to dissent, how excessive’.

And, coming to our own times, / Of course / Housman.’

Brace yourself: here comes Hera Lindsay Bird.

Smith rips into smug gentility in this portrait of a dreadful don, but she also takes on convention in the fabric of her poetry. Images are paper-thin and dry. Rhymes are gauche and clanging, or wrench the rhythm. A single line in an otherwise orderly stanza pokes out right over towards the right-hand margin or has to double back on itself. Subjects are austere (theology of the trinity, anyone?) or portentous or slight, and cliché is everywhere. Like the stray cat on my sofa, she has no use for us, her readers, no simpering or grandstanding or proving her worth. She just is what she is. Well, I love her. She’s my favourite old-school radical. I put her in the same poetry bucket as Hera Lindsay Bird who broke the poetry internet with ‘Keats is Dead so Fuck Me from Behind’: les enfants terribles, the most pure-hearted of poets.

Is there a writer who helped you find your own voice? Are there any writers who were inhibiting presences?

Notes

Some Are More Human Than Others: A Sketchbook by Stevie Smith; Gaberbocchus, 1958.

References to poems from: The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith; Faber, 2015. Collected Poems of Ted Hughes; Faber, 2005. Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems; Faber, 1981. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore; Faber, 2003.

1. I saw this list at the Smith College Plath archives in 2011.

2. Eg., notes Nicolas on de Staël in The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962. Karen V. Kukil (ed.) Faber, 2000. (p.317); or observation of trees and cells in Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963. Harper & Row, 1975. (p.61).

3. The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962. Karen V. Kukil (ed.) Faber, 2000. p.406.

What Plath’s work really needed was to lean in to the grisly and become unrelentingly unrelenting, as she would in Ariel and the last poems.

4. If we take Ted Hughes’s poem, ‘The literary Life’ as evidence, Moore seemed to reappraise Plath’s talents late in life: ‘Your little near-posthumous memoir / ‘OCEAN 1212’ / Was ‘so wonderful, so lit, so wonderful’. (Birthday Letters. Faber, 1999)

5. Here is a link to hear Longley reading ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ a beautiful and devastating elegy for an ice-cream seller murdered in Belfast during the Troubles.