The kind of poet Stevie Smith is begins to emerge from a close look at the Collected Poems. She does not develop, in any helpful sense of the word: the first handful of poems announce her concerns as clearly as do the final, posthumous poems. The consistency of technique and craftsmanship is as sure in 1937 as it is in 1969. To say that, though, is to acknowledge the inconsistency too, in that quite often the reader is left wondering whether Stevie Smith knew or cared when she had written a poem not quite true to her Muse. The answer to that sort of nagging doubt is probably that she knew but didn't care all that much. There is a deliberate carelessness in much of her writing which reflects her own rather cavalier attitude both to the world and to poetry, and this carelessness is something the reader has to confront, because it becomes, oddly enough, one of her peculiar strengths…. Stevie Smith is sufficiently sure of herself to throw at her audience quite a lot of what, in another context, she calls 'balsy nonsense', in the knowledge that, when she has to, she can redeem herself. This process of giving with one hand what she takes away with the other operates through all her work, and it is one which is itself disturbing for readers and critics. We do, after all, like our poets to develop, and to take themselves seriously. But the tendency to see all poets in terms of growth towards maturity, however natural and understandable, is not always illuminating: Keats has suffered because of it, so too has John Clare. Clare in fact provides a useful pointer in the argument, in that he has endured a fate similar to Stevie Smith's at the hands of critics prepared to acknowledge his presence but unwilling to absorb him into their patterns of critical discourse. You will not find Clare getting much of a mention in surveys of the Romantics and Victorians, and this is as much a hint as to his true stature as an indication of his supposedly minor significance. Furthermore, Clare evinces the same sort of inconsistency. Stevie Smith likewise stands outside any tradition of the day, and in so doing acts as a comment on what is happening elsewhere; she becomes a touchstone, just as to read Clare is to see him apart from his contemporaries and to see them in a new light.

The comparison with Clare is especially illuminating if we think of Clare's asylum poetry, where his lyricism achieves its fullest and most self-contained flight. Song after song spills out of the notebooks in a profusion that seems to challenge the rigours of critical analysis. It is in the aslyum poems that Clare comes closest to Blake. It seems to me significant that Blake, too, can be heard behind and through several of Stevie Smith's poems, and these allusions help to clarify the nature of the critical problem. For, alongside the innocence of Clare, alongside the small cluster of recurrent preoccupations which mark Clare's work and Stevie Smith's, there is the simple directness of Blake as he appears in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. (pp. 42-3)

Stevie Smith cultivates a particular type of simplicity which has its echoes of Blake especially, but the temptation to move towards greater abstruseness and complexity is always there, and a number of poems can be seen to fail when they succumb in this way: The risks of simplicity, so far as the poet is concerned, are enormous, particularly in an age which distrusts what is simple, which easily perceives when the simple becomes the simplistic. The arch, the knowing, the coy—simplicity attracts such labels. It seems to me that one of Stevie Smith's most important qualities is her determination to persevere within the confines of simplicity, as though at the back of her head all the time is Coleridge's urging of the poet to keep alive in adulthood the simplicity of the child. (pp. 43-4)

Stevie Smith's art often depends on what seems to be a carefully contrived carelessness, with respect to life as well as to art…. [For her] life is a matter of pain, of lost love, of desperation—and these things urge humour for their control. It is as though she engages us in the halting gait of a danse macabre where love and death and solitude hold hands; the music she dances to is generally quiet, off-beat—or, if it is noisy, the din rings slightly hollow. One of her poems celebrates Miss Pauncefort who 'sang at the top of her voice…. And nobody knew what she sang about' (which did not stop her singing in her manic way). The Muse for Stevie Smith tends to be quiet, even timid…. This relationship between Muse and poet is central to her vision, and to how Stevie Smith sees herself as a poet: it helps to explain her gait, her step at once firm and tentative. (pp. 44-5)

[In her poem, 'The Word',] Stevie Smith is making a connection between her dramatised experience and her role as poet, and in doing this she is going beyond Blake, who rarely, even in the dourest Songs of Experience, suggests that the agonised and terrified consciousness is his. That is the difference between his poem 'Little boy lost' and Stevie Smith's of the same name…. [Smith's] poem does not work because ultimately the little boy lost is transparently a surrogate of a poet without bearings. Much more successful is 'Little boy sick', where the Blakean idiom is recreated, and at the same time the dramatised utterance retains its integrity. The little lamb of Innocence has become a mangy tiger, his former glory departed utterly. Here is something of Stevie Smith's surprising virtuosity—surprising in that she would be the first to disclaim virtuosity…. The range of voices [in 'Little boy sick'] is wide, but never so much so that the poem gets out of control: we are constantly brought back to the tautness of Blake's 'Tyger', its impressed syntax. At the epicentre of the poem lies the audacious line 'O God I was so beautiful when I was well' which echoes, if anything, the stark cry in a Brecht/Weill song, 'Surabaya Johnny, my God, and I love you so', and has the same chokingly dramatic effect: typically the cry to God is both colloquial blasphemy and desperate appeal. Once again, Blake's world of experience is the one which has its special meaning for Stevie Smith; it is characteristic of her deep-seated pessimism that she should choose the only optimistic poem in Blake's canon of Experience as a jumping-off point for an exploration of her own desolation. (pp. 47-9)

An early poem 'Night-time in the cemetery' is one of her most moving poems because it acknowledges the bitterness of death even as it recognises the affinity. Here Stevie Smith strives to deserve the death she is to court more stoically elsewhere. It is not fanciful to hear Blake and Clare behind this poem, even Emily Dickinson; yet at the very core is the unmistakeable figure, the Stevie Smith whose colloquial twang explains the Clare-like insistence on peculiarity and strangeness…. This poem is a triumph of Stevie Smith's idiosyncratic art, and we learn not to be surprised by the fact that it comes so early in the canon: she returns to this world repeatedly, to weave variations of the subtlest and most lyrical kind on the theme of death and oblivion. She knows that the theme is inexhaustible, and that it is necessary, however hard that acknowledgement, when it would be so much easier, as in her dreams, to run away from it all. The reader of Stevie Smith finds himself making a long list of the memorable poems: there are far more poems announcing their authority than I have been able to hint at. It is ironic that a poet so concerned with scrupulosity, with the quietness of the Muse's voice, should be so fecund. She herself worries at this a lot, often referring to the parable of the talents. In the last resort her claim on posterity rests on this extraordinary combination of the minimal and the generous. In one sense, her work is a burden to her, something she lands herself with:

        I can call up old ghosts, and they will come,
        But my art limps,—I cannot send them home.

But she accepts the limp, learns to live with the ghosts that haunt her, until she is able to celebrate them. (pp. 54-5)