The most striking characteristic of [Stevie Smith's] work is the rhythm, a speech rhythm slipping naturally into metre and out again, a rhythm so strong that it overrides considerations of syntax and punctuation and—in releasing language from its formal structures—finds new forms, new tones. Language thus released from traditional bonds and held tenuously in new bonds of rhythm, doggerel rhyme, assonance, and tone of voice, becomes capable of a range of expression unusual in more traditional usage—though she forfeits certain formal effects, of course.

As she treats language, so she treats our common reality. Her fanciful vision illuminates our world and elements of our common experience. It disengages emotions and situations from their actual contexts and presents them distilled in a fanciful context. Her world of fancy is not escapist. It is like a mask through which she trains her eyes on actual experience; her transmutations of actual experience clarify it with knowing innocence and seldom sentimentalize it. The fanciful world is a cruel one—of fairy tales, legends and myths peopled by princes, princesses, ogres and ghouls, neurotic animals and good spirits whose emotions and frustrations are ours. It is a world where guilt is out of place. In effect, she creates a modern pastoral. The short story poems about aristocrats or legendary people are another aspect of the same fanciful pastoralism. Her themes grow powerful through 'enchantment'—rhythms and the voice persuade us emotionally. Human self-deception is an evil enchantment; against it Stevie Smith marshals the beneficent enchantment of poetry, which throws the self-deception into relief. Her aim is ethical and didactic as well as to entertain. (pp. 203-04)

[Stevie Smith's] attitude to her models—for many of the poems have specific models, particularly nineteenth-century British and American poems, hymns and popular tunes, and plainsong conventions—is ambivalent. Some she approaches in the spirit of parody, writing a poem about a swinging ape to the tune of 'Greensleeves'. At other times she depends on our recollection of the strong rhythms of an earlier poem to lend resonance to her own poem. Her individual voice speaks above the rhythm of another poet, defying and then confirming our expectation. Her models do not include Emily Dickinson, a poet with whom she has often been compared. Where Emily Dickinson took rhythm as her constant and concentrated on the effective combination of carefully chosen words, Stevie Smith takes her vocabulary—which is generally simple and similar throughout her work—for granted and expends most of her energy on the rhythm.

Edgar Allan Poe echoes through much of her verse. 'The Stroke', 'The True Tyrant', and 'November' contain specific echoes of Poe and each poem develops his rhythms. Stevie Smith seems to have been haunted by 'Ulalume' and 'Annabel Lee' and the underwater kingdom of some of Poe's poems. Many of her characters drown, and several watery gods preserve the victims as relics, deep and dead, but seeming asleep and pricelessly beautiful. She must have sensed a justice and ghostly permanence in rivers and the sea, as Poe did. Poe also suggested some of the odd and macabre names she uses. And though she builds on him with a mixture of dependence and parody, her power often derives from his rhythms, though the speaking voice is her own. (p. 204)

The poems, then sending down taproots into some text or musical tune, have an authority not entirely their own and yet not plagiarized either. In 'The Grange' we hear Kipling, in 'Our Bog is Dood' we hear the Blake of the 'Book of Thel' and in 'A Fairy Story' and a number of short-lined poems we hear the Blake of the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'. Cowper and Browning are there too, and Tennyson of the Idylls and 'The Lady of Shalott'. Coleridge with the cadences of 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' announces himself from behind several poems. Hymn tunes and rhythms, prayer book and Biblical echoes can be heard. Hence the poems that reveal the passing of love, or of life, or of social orders, are nostalgic not in diction or specific content, but in the echoes the rhythms suggest, hinting at other sources and analogues.

Given the preponderance of Victorian models, her use of often antiquated diction littered with 'Oh' and 'Alas', her quaintness, her painful mock-Victorian doggerel rhymes, how is it that she evades banality? How does she manage to revitalize an outworn poetic language by means of the language itself? The answer lies in her humour—not irony but wit which refreshes the language and makes it meaningful again. If one says 'alas' glumly, one is being banal. If one says 'alas' slyly, the humour and the lament coexist, if the context is correct. Her humour redeems the outworn language. The unexpected intrusion into her poems of arch malapropisms and modern colloquialisms is often effective. The humour does not wear thin on re-reading. (p. 205)