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"Crying: I should write a poem,
Can I look a wave in the face
If I do not write a poem about a sea-wave,
Putting the words in place."
- Stevie Smith, "Mrs. Arbuthnot"1
"A queen of contradictions," the modern British poet Stevie Smith remains both in and out of the English canon, without easy resolutions for the dichotomies that have emerged around her. Ironically, perhaps, her plea to remain exempt from the evaluations and judgments prevalent in the oft-anthologized "No Categories!" does little to keep readers and critics from subjecting her to any number of diametrically opposed subject positions. Sanford Sternlicht, writing In Search of Stevie Smith, outlines some of the binaries that bind her:
. . . despite the growing critical attention that Stevie's work is receiving, actually positing the "real" Stevie and locating meanings and values in her writing has become more difficult simply because her stream-of-consciousness prose and her poetic embryos are so widely and so variously interpretable that exegetes clash and contradict. Stevie has been called an essentially public poet employing prosopopoeia to address her audience in several distinct voices including that of a child; an adolescent; a bitter, cynical woman; a theologian; and a philosopher. She has been called a stand-up comic and an ironist, a lyricist, a confessional writer, a closet dissident if that is not a contradiction in terms, a satirist, and a Christian apologist. She has been described as a lover of animals and a hater of children. . . . She has been called a masker and a revealer. In the ring ratings of twentieth-century poets, she has been judged a lightweight and a heavy. She has been proclaimed an airhead and an egghead. She has been accused of anti-Semitism and general misanthropy. She has been praised as one of the most musical poets of her generation, and she has been castigated for having a tin ear. She was clearly preoccupied with death, but she lived her life with enthusiasm, even glee. She imagined extravagantly. She was a queen of contradictions, and yet she bombards us with binaries. She was . . . well . . . Stevie.2
But to be "well, Stevie" reveals many of the interpretive tendencies involved even in her own name....