Elizabeth Jennings is unique in two particular ways: she is the Movement’s only woman and its only Catholic. Born Elizabeth Joan Jennings in Boston, Lincolnshire, on 18 July 1926, she was the daughter of Henry Cecil Jennings, a physician. As a teenager she studied poetry in school and was swept up by G. K. Chesterton’s battle poem “Lepanto.” She wrote an essay on the work and soon was eagerly studying the great romantics—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Her godfather-uncle was a poet, and he encouraged Elizabeth to write poems herself. She recalls that her first one came to her almost automatically at 13 while she was waiting at a bus stop. From the start Jennings was intrigued by the fascinating variety of poems that could be produced from formal metrical patterns, so she turned her interest to sonnets, ballads, and odes, though she admits that only one four-line poem of her juvenilia warrants preservation. At 15 she began sending out her verse with no success, but she was encouraged by a handwritten rejection from the now-defunct New English Weekly, which affirmed, “These poems show talent.”¹

Even in Jennings’s earliest poems a sense of form predominates, and the primary characteristics of her mature verse—regular rhyme and meter—are evident. Moreover, they frequently display the simple vision of childhood in an emotionally honest, clear manner.

Jennings moved to Oxford as a child and was educated at Oxford High School and later St. Anne’s College, taking an M.A. in English language and literature with honors in 1949, having earlier failed her B.Litt studies, which concentrated on Matthew Arnold as both a romantic and classical poet. At Oxford she met Philip Larkin and John Wain and enrolled in a court handwriting seminar with Kingsley Amis. Despite his youth Amis already held strong opinions on literature and art, and he introduced Jennings to jazz. They spent hours together in record shops and cinemas, but he was never critical of her conventional preference for classical music. Amis also read and admired her poetry, and both had poems in the 1948 Oxford anthology. When Amis and James Michie edited it the following year, they looked for hard, modern poems to print. They selected six of Jennings’s poems for publication.

After graduation her verse began to appear in various magazines, including the Spectator, the New Statesman, and the Poetry Review. Jennings worked for a short time as an advertising copywriter, employment which she believes made her style increasingly slick, relaxed, and more publishable. But Jennings was fired from the agency, and in 1950 she hired on as an assistant at the Oxford City Library, where she worked until 1958. Oxford undergraduates interested in her poems or in writing poetry themselves visited her there regularly and often invited her to dinner and the theater. Among those students were Geoffrey Hill, Adrian Mitchell, Anthony Thwaite, and Alan Brownjohn and Americans Donald Hall and Adrienne Rich, all of whom were to achieve their own recognition as poets and critics.

When Jennings had assembled enough poems for a book, she sought a publisher. In time she was introduced to Oscar Mellor, a private printer living in the small village of Eynsham outside Oxford. Mellor issued a pamphlet of her work, thus beginning the Fantasy Press Poets Series, which would come to include works by Gunn, Davie, Larkin, Amis, and Holloway among its distinguished contributors. The success of this inaugural volume prompted Mellor to put forth a full-length book of Jennings’s verse, Poems, which included three of her poems from Oxford Poetry 1949 and earned her an Arts Council prize in 1953. Fantasy Press also issued the first full-length books of poems by Gunn (Fighting Terms, 1954) and Davie (The Brides of Reason, 1955).

As a result of her Arts Council award Jennings was interviewed and photographed by local and London reporters and became one of the first Movement writers to have her fame established primarily through poetry, although Amis and Wain had both published novels by then, and Davie’s Purity of Diction in English Verse had received considerable critical attention. She began to feel that she should have at least one poem or book review a week in the important journals. She nearly succeeded. Time and Tide and the Spectator asked her to contribute articles and reviews, and Stephen Spender asked her for poems for his new magazine, Encounter. John Lehmann’s New Soundings radio program had included a poem by Jennings in its first broadcast, and he included three more by her in the first issue of London Magazine, prominently placing her work alongside that by Thom Gunn and T. S. Eliot, who wrote a special introduction for the issue. And she was included in Enright’s Poets of the 1950s and Conquest’s New Lines anthologies, the two collections that fixed the roll of membership in the Movement, although Conquest humorously claimed that Jennings’s relationship with the Movement was comparable to that of a schoolmistress with a bunch of drunken marines.

From the outset her lyrics were distinguished by their brevity (usually fewer than five stanzas in length) and simplicity. Her vocabulary resists strange and unusual words, and there is a noted absence of proper nouns in her work. Preoccupied with the themes of the individual’s fears and essential loneliness, her poems became noted for their wit, lyrical innocence, and exploration of nuances of the spirit.

“Delay,” the opening poem in the volume, exhibits the tentativeness and rationality commonly found in Movement verse. The poem is one of her best; Jennings chose it for her Collected Poems and Selected Poems and Larkin included it in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. The poem, a short formal lyric, seems well suited to Jennings’s talent as she fashions an analogy that compares the speed of light to the speed of love. Despite its emotional subject, the poem’s regular stanzas and exactness of language enhance its logic. Jennings emphasizes the colossal distance between lovers by springing from the first stanza to the second on the word love.

The radiance of that star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how
Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

(Jennings CP, 3)

Her diction is plain and exacting, yet the understatement in the poem’s last line is both tender and poignant.

Jennings’s preference for such emotional and syntactic spareness is consistent with the erudite attitudes of other Movement poets, although she was the only member of the group who never worked full-time in academia. While her poems occasionally seem detached in their attempts to demystify emotions, Jennings did not wish to be limited by an intellectual aesthetic. A cradle Catholic, she maintained a lifelong faith in Christianity, which Enright failed in doing, and poems of religious belief always occupied an important place in her work.

Jennings published her second volume, A Way of Looking, two years later in 1955. Its 40 poems also display the cool, natural, uncontrived style found in Poems. As its title suggests, the volume is interested more in probing ways of looking than in developing particular subject matter. Even when her topics are factually based and drawn from historical record, she rarely employs detailed settings and considers actuality merely a point of departure from which self-understanding may be abstracted. Physical reality serves more as a speculative premise in these poems than as a reminder of verisimilitude. “Not in the Guide Books,” from the book’s last section, is one such lyric, a travel poem in which public experience gives rise to private understanding. The formula is comparably employed in “For a Child Born Dead” and “The Recognition.” And in “Tribute” she directly acknowledges the importance of poetry to this associative process:

The poem is enough that joins me to
The world that seems far to grasp at when
Images fail and words are gabbled speech:
At those times clarity appears in you,
Your mind holds meanings that my mind can read.

(Jennings CP, 35)

In their reviews of A Way of Looking, some critics denounced the unfulfilled potential promised by Jennings’s first collection. She reflected, “A second book of verse is always a hazard. Critics are waiting to pounce and declare, ‘It doesn’t live up to the promise shown in her first book.’ If you have enlarged your scope in the matter of theme and form you are unlikely to win even then, for journalists will say, ‘She is uneasy with her new subject matter’” (Contemporary, 110–11). Nevertheless, the book won the Somerset Maugham prize for 1956; the award stipulated that the recipient must spend at least three months abroad in a country of her choosing. The financial remuneration of 400 pounds enabled her to spend three months in Italy, which she declared to be the happiest and most worthwhile time of her life, and to return to England with 80 pounds left over.

The poems she wrote in Rome became the basis of her third book, A Sense of the World (1958), and naturally many of them, such as “Fountain,” “St. Paul Outside the Walls,” and “Letter from Assisi,” contained Roman themes. The poems record her love for Italy and her Catholic heritage, but they are more than postcards intending to conserve the itinerary and topography of her travels. The settings also provide juxtaposition for her spiritual dislocation. Jennings’s poetry was becoming decidedly less confessional, and her concerns turned to children, old men and women, storms, religious motifs, and the passage of time. Unlike her Movement colleagues, Jennings never felt comfortable writing poems about popular issues and current events, believing that successful poems absorb writers wholly and completely and not just for the moment. While she admitted that good poems might be written about such matters as nuclear warfare, modern art, popular advertising, and scientific experimentation—all of which had served as topics for Conquest, Larkin, and other Movement writers—she found those subjects generally less compelling than the familiar themes of love and death with which poets had traditionally dealt. “The best poets writing today are those who are most personal, who are trying > to examine and understand their own emotions, behaviour or actions, or those of other people” (“Comments,” 32). By writing about familiar subjects in orthodox ways Jennings felt she was participating in the proud English tradition of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Eliot.

Moreover, satisfied with no single political party, Jennings was not interested in writing political verse, though unlike her New Lines colleagues she was devoutly committed to exploring themes of Roman Catholicism. Her Catholicism is especially conspicuous in A Sense of the World. While her religiosity and absence of social correctives may at first glance appear uncharacteristic of Movement verse, she explains their relevance. “I believe firmly that every poet must be committed to something and, if his religion or political convictions mean anything to him at all, I do not see how they can fail to affect his poems” (“Context,” 51).

Although the verses in A Sense of the World are primarily lyrical, she began to experiment with other poetic forms, including free verse, the prose poem, and a good deal of terza rima. She returned to England but visited Rome again in February 1957; she then quit her job, and in April 1958 returned to Rome for 13 weeks.

Upon coming home she became a general reader for Chatto and Windus, the publishers of William Empson and F. R. Leavis, and the position afforded her the opportunity to attend literary teas with T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell. Her reputation grew, earning her a membership in the Royal Society of Literature in 1961, and her work was included in the first Penguin Modern Poets series, published in 1962, which also contained the work of Lawrence Durrell and R.S. Thomas. The book went through three additional printings in the next five years and spawned subsequent volumes in a long-running sequence of titles.

In her second year at Chatto and Windus, Jennings suffered a severe mental breakdown and attempted suicide. She consequently left Chatto’s and would eventually write two books devoted to her struggle with depression, which are discussed later in the chapter. But during her recovery she completed work on Every Changing Shape, a book about mysticism and poetry, reviewed novels for the Listener, and worked on four other books: a new book of poems, Song for a Birth or a Death; a poetry book for children, Let’s Have Some Poetry; a translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets; and a pamphlet she was editing for the British Council, An Anthology of Modern Verse 1940–60.

Song for a Birth or a Death (1961) was composed in Italy, and it deviates from the Movement themes of insularity and secularity. The poems are profoundly religious, at times even mystical, and they display a distinct lack of irony. In “To a Friend with a Religious Vocation,” she struggles to articulate her religious vision:

                                                  I see
Within myself no wish to breed or build
Or take the three vows ringed by poverty.
          And yet I have a sense,
Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry
Of purpose.

(Jennings CP, 114)

In “A World of Light” she basks in “A mood the senses cannot touch or damage, / A sense of peace beyond the breathing word” (Jennings CP, 92), and in another poem she derives a calming tranquility from a Roman mass, even though she does not understand Latin. Though mystical experiences are by nature fundamentally private, Jennings suggests in “Men Fishing in the Arno” that they can become the basis for a whole community with

Each independent, none
Working with others and yet accepting
Others. From this one might, I think
Build a whole way of living.

(Jennings CP, 117)

Jennings justifies religion’s close connection to her art, believing that the host, wine, and offering contribute to a sacrosanct vision “of art as gesture and as sacrament, > art with its largesse and its own restraint” (Jennings CP, 104).

Jennings laments that the sense of the sacred is vanishing from modern life, “so the poetic gift, which still remains something mysterious and inexplicable has tended to be ignored along with many other intangible things.”² Her obeisance to the idea of salvation through art prompted Wain to dedicate his “Green Fingers” to her, claiming “Your art will save your life, Elizabeth.”³

In contrast to Song for a Birth or Death, her anthology seems a clear celebration of Movement virtues. Beginning with the publication of Eliot’s last great poem, An Anthology of Modern Verse 1940–60 (1961) covers “twenty years of suffering, restlessness and uncertainty,”⁴ a period marked by an urge for formal order and clarity in verse in defiance of the chaos and confusion of postwar society. Most of the poets she includes were children or adolescents when World War II began. “The war was for them, therefore, little more than a rather vague, unhappy memory. They began to write their mature poems in an atmosphere of political and, indeed, cosmic uncertainty. Yet, paradoxically, it is in their work that we can see the most striking evidence of the desire for form, style and order, and also of a wish to stress the dignity of human personality” (Anthology, 9).

Believing that such ruthless honesty and underlying passion had been best exemplified by poets whose love of simplicity and disdain for poetic artifice were common to her own work, Jennings selected all nine Movement poets for inclusion in her anthology: two poems apiece from Amis, Conquest, Davie, Enright, Holloway, and Wain, three from herself (one each from her first three volumes, including her favorite poem, “Fountain”), and four from Larkin and Gunn.

But An Anthology of Modern Verse 1940–60 notwithstanding, Jennings’s gradual dissatisfaction with the characteristic Movement style was becoming apparent. Writing in London, she paid homage to the past but also declared her intention to break with its traditions:

I don’t myself always want to write the rhyming lyric of thirty-odd lines. Indeed, I do at times feel positively inhibited and exasperated by the form. At the moment, I am extremely eager to write longer poems, dramatic verse (I would, for example, like to write the libretto for an opera), and prose poems. But I am still as fascinated as I was when I was thirteen by the marvellous variety within strict English lyric verse. As for the “poetic language” of today—there are times when I feel that it is too dry, too intellectual, sometimes, even, too facile. Maybe it needs a little rough treatment, though I can see absolutely no virtue in confusion or obscurity for their own sake.

(“Difficult,” 51)

Jennings worried that she was becoming too slick and feared that her talent might dry up before she mastered her craft. She sought to be less an observer and commentator and more a vehicle for her personal experiences, perhaps as a curative for her mental illness. Her tortuous recovery from depression through hospitalization and analysis was detailed by Jennings in Recoveries (1964) and The Mind Has Mountains (1966). The verses in these two collections are remarkable, given their subject matter, for their lack of sentimentality; they are not the ravings of a broken spirit, nor do they display an open sense of self-pity. Rather she views all those in the mental hospital—patients, doctors, and nurses—with detached compassion, and they are hardly the type of commonsense poems on which the Movement was established.

Jennings’s best poems always seem contemplative in nature, and the hospital setting was appropriate for her meditations on psychological pain. The remarkable stillness in these poems is achieved by her clear, spare language. She concentrates meaning in the poems’ fluent final lines as momentary stays against disorder, allowing her to transcend for a time the hurt that prompted the utterance. In this way Jennings uses her art to exorcise the demons of her breakdown by transforming the chaos of her dark dreams into a kind of serenity. In “Works of Art” she asserts that, although art so often “appears like an escape >We want more order than we ever meet / And art keeps driving us most hopefully on” (Jennings CP, 137). Though these poems are frequently disquieting, Jennings retains control in them. She examines her illness lucidly and without resorting to self-confession or linguistic confusion.

The Mind Has Mountains, which won the Richard Hillary prize, derives its title from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s explorations into the abyss of mental despair. Identifying with other creative artists who have suffered extreme mental distress, Jennings proclaims in “Van Gogh” that madness may be an important component of art’s tranquility:

There is a theory that the very heart
Of making means a flaw, neurosis, some
Sickness; yet others say it is release.
I only know that your wild, surging art
Took you to agony, but makes us come
Strangely to gentleness, a sense of peace.

(Jennings CP, 176)

Jennings’s sympathy with her fellow sufferers and patients is strong. She insists in “Madness” that

It is the lack of reason makes us fear,
The feeling that ourselves might be like this.
We are afraid to help her or draw near
As if she were infectious and could give
Some taint, some touch of her own fantasies,
Destroying all the things for which we live.

(Jennings CP, 173)

Jennings was hospitalized on several occasions, and she attempted to gain some peace through the efficacy of poetry, believing “the act of writing a poem is itself an implicit affirmation of the possibility of order” (“Difficult,” 30). The composure which she sought in her own verse and valued in that of others became the goal of her personal life, and her poetry often seems a courageous effort to discover a sense of order within, although she confesses in “In a Mental Hospital Sitting Room” that “It does not seem a time for lucid rhyming” (Jennings CP, 171), and she laments in “On a Friend’s Relapse and Return to a Mental Clinic” that “It is the good who often know joy least” (Jennings CP, 188). The Mind Has Mountains displays a heroic dedication to return to the placidity of the poems she wrote before her breakdown. She bravely tries to come to terms with her turbulent illness, but some poems offer little more than pious pronouncements. And while the poems are highly personal in nature, they retain a formality antipodal to their subject and are never particularly revealing in an autobiographical kind of way.

Jennings’s Collected Poems was issued in 1967, drawing its material from the seven books she had written over a 14-year period. The collection reprints 207 of her 243 previously issued poems. Its publication renewed critical interest in her work, and it was reviewed widely as critics used it as a benchmark to assess her artistic development. Anthony Thwaite noted her “steady and persistent contemplative gift”⁵ and appreciated her unsentimental lyrical verses. He proclaimed that the volume “shows a remarkable unity of tone and theme, repetitive and yet gaining strength from that very fact. The most notable development has been one of giving greater prominence to the immediate and circumstantial, and yet clearly the later poems of mental agony and illness come from the same person who wrote such pure and clear lyrics and meditations as the early ‘Delay,’ ‘Reminiscence’ and ‘The Island.’”⁶

Julian Symons praised her ingenuity and wit and remarked favorably on her ability to construct metaphysical conceits. He found sources for her organization and technical clarity in Robert Graves and A. E. Housman. Although he charted little stylistic development in Jennings’s verse, Symons observed a change in her subjects. Even the mental illness poems “are composed with the cool firmness of the early poems. Nobody can have written less hysterically about hysteria, yet the sense of personal involvement is always there.”⁷

The themes of her next book, The Animals’ Arrival (1969), are decidedly shopworn, however, and the verses themselves shrill as Jennings sought to emerge from the writings about her breakdown by creating what seemed to her more vital poetry. The book is dedicated to her friend poet Peter Levi, but her concerns here are less personal and more aesthetic. In “Of Languages” she demands a new poetic, believing that the hour is nearing when language must be made sudden and new and images sharp and still. A call for honesty also appears in “Resolve,” where she vows not to write so glibly of the ill, choosing instead warmth, sanity, and health. But on the whole, the poems are not especially engaging.

Jennings’s poetic decline continued in Relationships (1972), which Alisdair Maclean labeled “catastrophic.”⁸ He blames the decrement on her use of Emily Dickinson for a poetic model. Although the resemblance of Jennings’s verse to Dickinson’s had been approvingly noted by John Thompson in his review of A Sense of the World, Maclean complains that “for Emily Dickinson’s apparent simplicity, however, Miss Jennings too often supplies bathos, and for phrases like ‘zero at the bone’ substitutes a language colourless to the point of invisibility. The trouble seems to be a lack of any real pressure in the creation of these poems” (Maclean, 389). He also faults her language as stilted, inverted, and awkward, as in “Simply because they were human, I admire”⁹ (“In Memory of Anyone Unknown to Me”). Only her pain and vulnerability, best articulated in “Sympathy,” keep the poems from seeming overly didactic.

A stronger Jennings emerged in Growing-Points in 1975, one admittedly determined to gather strength from her pain. She continued to experiment technically with a variety of verse forms, and the volume seems aptly named. The poems themselves have grown longer, thereby freeing up her diction from the restrictions of regular meter while still remaining essentially pure, and her poetic line has been lengthened as well (though sometimes leading to irksome runons, as in “An Abandoned Palace,” where the lines sometimes exceed 20 syllables). Experiments with free verse and prose poetry alternate with traditional poems in an attempt to bring a new force to her work. The poems still frequently end in aphorisms, but the volume shows just how far Jennings had begun to stray from Movement dictum. Her trademark homilies and quiet lyricism are still visible, but her realizations are more labored, muddled, wistful, and complex than before.

Her divergence from Movement themes and techniques is quite evident in her myth poems on Orpheus, Persephone, and the Minotaur and in her muted, unfocused imagery, which all too often falls into clichés and stereotypes—sunsets, falling leaves, and the like. Her poems of tribute and direct address to famous artistic, literary, and religious figures are on the whole sanctimonious and sentimental. The volume includes poems to Mozart and Hopkins, homage to Van Gogh, Thomas Aquinas, Mondrian, Rembrandt, Wallace Stevens, and Auden. And there is a bold but ill-considered monologue projected by Christ on the cross.

Religious themes compose the dramatic substance of Consequently I Rejoice (1977), an ample collection of 88 meditations on Jennings’s Christian faith. As in Growing-Points, she records the pain and suffering of a convalescing Catholic, and there are again dramatic monologues from religious figures, here Christ and Mary. While still an intensely personal, lyric poet, in Consequently I Rejoice Jennings turns a bit abstract in her longing for faith, for the book attempts to universalize her campaign against despair. It begins similarly to her previous collections by documenting her nightmares, and there are the familiar lines of self-flagellation, as in “Elegy for Aldous Huxley”—“You put away / The novels, verses, stories where the ‘I’ / Dominates, makes us masochists”¹⁰—and of pleading, as in “Cradle Catholic”—“O take my unlove and despair / And what they lack let faith repair” (Consequently, 36). But she expands the scope of her study beyond the personal as she traces her spiritual and intellectual development through a year-long cycle. Seasonal and cyclical patterns (poems of parents and infants, images of sun and moon and night and day) accent the soul’s passage until at the cycle’s end the last nightmares are no longer uniquely hers but everyone’s—especially the elderly, who either dwell in or remain bereft of lasting spiritual peace. Her “Old People’s Nursing Home” is mindful of Larkin’s “The Old Fools”; though her poem is more compassionate and intuitive than Larkin’s, it surely lacks his distinctive irony.

By compressing the journey of the soul into one year’s time, Jenning’s book invites comparison to In Memoriam, though it was certainly conceived on a smaller scale. Tennyson’s “swallow flights of song” are designed to chart the soul’s passage. Jennings too avails herself of bird metaphors, for her poems are haunted by auguries of flight and birdsong meant as hopeful reminders that her spirit may one day again soar. “Wisdom is in our bloodstream not in brain,” she affirms in “Song for the Swifts” (Consequently, 15).

Throughout the poems Jennings equates religious doubt with her self-doubt as a writer, and in penning poems of tribute to other artists (Huxley, Edward Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Klee, Cézanne, and Virginia Woolf her examples here) she actually seeks self-illumination and understanding; the artists’ identity seems consequential to her own. Tennyson felt himself a lesser artist than Hallam, but for Jennings it was Thomas (“For Edward Thomas”) who embodied the quiet, principled, amiable nature she wished to capture in her verse. Her meditations on other artists are but another form of self-reflection, and it is instrumental to both her faith and poetic achievement in that she views the relationship between the individual soul and God akin to that between artist and creation.

The title of her next offering, Moments of Grace (1979), refers to those brief occasions when despair and frustration are eclipsed by moments of spiritual transcendancy. Jennings’s religious verse consistently subscribes to the Wordsworthian notion that daily human experience is laden with potential revelations. Suspending the soul between the natural and supernatural seems her aesthetic goal, but all too often she depicts her aloneness and sorrow without achieving that measured balance. Jennings openly acknowledges that prayer and the sacraments of her faith have not always sustained her. That her devoutness could not allay her religious dismay proved especially troubling; a life-long Catholic, she struggled perpetually for the protection and blessings of God.

Moments of Grace is not about her mental illness, and it includes Jennings’s first poem to address a public issue, “Euthanasia.” More than in her earlier works, she attempts to witness the unification of God and nature. As a result the strong lyricism of prior volumes is diminished by her emphasis on what is essentially more ponderous, philosophic matter. Perhaps she had previously been afraid to explore such deep, ruminative questions, but in Moments of Grace she is ill at ease with her speculative subject matter. She confesses her awkwardness and alienation, and is uncertain when probing the grace afforded by the natural world. Undoubtedly Jennings believed the Wordsworthian premises articulated in her verse, but she is a gentle arguer and seems envious of those able to overcome their estrangement and attain those rare “moments of grace.”

Perhaps her reticence is strategic, meant to suggest that she is unworthy of spiritual consolation, that she is to remain in awe forever before God. In any case, the poems are often interrupted by mild interjections that reverse the course of her ideas but allow her to adhere to her metrical pattern (her fondness for terza rima persists). She seems as restive with her fellow humans as she does with herself, and is at times overly apologetic and colloquial, as if her vicarious experiences were more important than her personal ones.

Selected Poems appeared in the same year as Moments of Grace. Ninety-one poems from her Collected Poems, three with slight verbal changes, appear in Selected Poems. That few changes appear in the poems is unsurprising, for 12 years earlier she conceded in an interview with John Press that she wrote swiftly and revised little. Surprisingly, though, three-quarters of the poems written between her Collected and Selected Poems, that period of her great mental torment, were omitted presumably because Jennings felt they lacked the impact of her earlier work and thereby did not warrant inclusion.

In the 1980s Jennings was again drawn to Italy and southern travel, issuing Italian Light and Other Poems in 1981 and the Bibbiena poems, Celebrations and Elegies, the following year. Her Lincolnshire childhood is the subject of her fourteenth book of poems, Extending the Territory (1985). Her more recent poetry, like that in her first books, is marked by restraint and understatement. Elizabeth Jennings “is not the kind of poet who is likely to find it acceptable to ‘say something a bit more interesting’ than she means.”¹¹ She has remained a quiet, readable poet preoccupied with suffering and pain, and she has a musical ear, a talent fashioned out of decades of plumbing her own ephemerality and isolation. Her growth as a poet has been modest, though she is still craftsmanlike in her approach to verse and continues to prefer rhyme and traditional meters as ways to balance form and content. A lyrical writer who shuns lengthy descriptions, Jennings is more a temporal than spatial poet; her romanticism and imagery tend toward intellectualization and allegory and away from plot.

Consequently, she continues to receive the complaints, long leveled against Movement verse, that her work is emotionally diffident and self-conscious, that it is frequently too literal, didactic, and banal, and that it lacks vivid descriptive appeal.

William Blissett assesses her contribution to the period as follows: “The student of literary history will discern in Elizabeth Jennings the marks of her generation and The Movement—the continuity of rhyme and reason, of syntax and stanza (as if Ezra Pound had never lived), the easy rhythms, the eschewing of decoration, the control of metaphor; but he will also notice how the one woman and the one Catholic stands apart from the others, in the special insights given her by the enjoyment of Italy and the suffering of illness, by her librarian’s nonacademic love of literature, and by her lifelong religious concern.”¹²

Notes

1. Elizabeth Jennings, “Elizabeth Jennings,” in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (Detroit: Gale, 1987), 107; hereafter cited in text as Contemporary.

2. Elizabeth Jennings, “The Difficult Balance,” London Magazine, November 1959, 28; hereafter cited in text as “Difficult.”

3. John Wain, Letters to Five Artists (New York: Viking, 1969), 55.

4. Elizabeth Jennings, An Anthology of Modern Verse 1940–60 (London: Methuen, 1961), 7; hereafter cited in text as Anthology.

5. Anthony Thwaite, Twentieth-Century English Poetry: An Introduction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), 44.

6. Anthony Thwaite, “Elizabeth Jennings,” Contemporary Poets (London: St. James, 1970), 559–60.

7. Julian Symons, “Clean and Clear,” New Statesman, 13 October 1967, 476.

8. Alisdair Maclean, “Marble Fun,” Listener, 22 March 1973, 389; hereafter cited in text.

9. Elizabeth Jennings, Relationships (London: Macmillan, 1972), 19.

10. Elizabeth Jennings, Consequently I Rejoice (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), 54; hereafter cited in text as Consequently.

11. John Matthias, “Pointless and Poignant,” Poetry, March 1977, 350.

12. William Blissett, “Elizabeth Jennings,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 27 (Detroit: Gale, 1978), 170.