The impression of Stevie Smith in [Me Again: Uncollected Writings] is overwhelming, almost too much so: it is not so much a question of her putting a head round the door and trilling Whoopee here I am again, as of plumping herself down in one's lap. That is an impression she would not have wished to make. She was not only an intensely professional writer but a sort of Parnassian, whatever contrary impression the idiom of her poems may give. Her sweetest songs were those which tell of saddest thought, but tell of it by odd contraries….

The originality of her poems seems like isolation made visible. They are childish in the sense in which Henry James's children are childish, little images of dispossession which have a quality all their own. Like such children she is never on the Side of Life, but of the fatigue which for...