The Poetry Picture Book: Stevie Smith and Children’s Culture

Abstract

Curiously, Stevie Smith circulates as matriarch of contemporary British women’s poetry and as child-poet of modernism.¹ Beginning with her first volumes of poetry in the 1930s, Smith actively affiliated her work with childhood and children’s culture— from the cartoonish drawings that accompanied her poems to the Peter Pan collars she donned for her readings. Browsing her Collected Poems, readers encounter philosophical inquiries and nursery rhythms, social satires and fairy tales, mythological figures and frolicking animals. This combination of gravitas and girlishness makes Smith a challenging figure for women’s poetry studies. Because childhood plays such a key role in her signature style and reception history, critics tend to elide her poems’ child speakers with Smith herself. By shifting our focus from Smith’s childhood and personality to her sustained engagement with children’s culture, we can resituate Smith’s poems and pictures within the multiple meanings of childhood that they reiterate, revise, and reinvent. As we shall see, this horizontal approach not only removes Smith from the literary nursery, but also prompts us to reconsider how conceptions of childhood shape women’s poetry studies.