Capricious Intentions in Stevie Smith’s Poems and Drawings

Abstract

There is a contradiction in how Stevie Smith saw the relationship between her poems and drawings. On the one hand, she looked at her doodles as vital to her poetry and backed with a great deal of intentionality. She painstakingly cut and pasted them into her drafts and left detailed notes to her publishers when those placements were not to her exact specifications. On the other hand, though, she talked about her doodles as if they were ephemeral and backed only by caprice. This essay argues that Smith’s doodles play at the intersection of intentionality and caprice; in doing so, they become deliberately detachable objects that signify both placed with and when displaced from her poetry. Decisions, whether by Smith or by her editors, to move or remove an image have both subtle and dramatic changes for readers’ experiencing of her poems. This paper relies on archival and published sources to provide readings of several of Smith’s poems including ‘Do Take Muriel Out,’ ‘The Rehearsal,’ ‘The After-Thought,’ and ‘Not Waving but Drowning.’ In their continual ability to be removed and reattached to her poetry, Smith’s doodles destabilize the texts that they supposedly compliment, while at the same time also revitalizing them by allowing them to remain open to new interpretations.

Keywords:

• doodle
• poetry
• drawing
• interpretation
• Stevie Smith
• fairy tale
• textual genesis
• publication
• proof
• manuscript
• archive

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Frances Spalding’s Stevie Smith: A Biography; Will May’s edited All the Poems; Hermione Lee’s edited Stevie Smith: A Collection; Barbera and McBrien’s edited Me Again.

2 See Hamish MacGibbon’s introduction to The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith where he explains many of his editorial decisions to include or remove a doodle.

3 Hamish MacGibbon recalls Smith enchanting her audiences ‘at pop festivals in the 60s when she wowed her audiences averaging around a third of her age’ (personal correspondence, January 10 2013).