[In the following review, Feaver considers Warner's poetic output, contending that “more real cause of regret, however, considering the strangely compelling quality of her best work, is that poetry was for most of her life a peripheral and not a major concern.”]

In the course of Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel Lolly Willowes it suddenly dawns on the heroine that she is a witch by vocation. It is a discovery that not only liberates her from a life as a much put-upon spinster-aunt but also enables her to view the world with the eyes of a poet: noticing for the first time “the sudden oblique movements of the water-drops that glistened on the cabbage-leaves, or the affinity between the dishevelled brown hearts of the sun flowers and Mrs Leak's scrubbing-brush, propped up on the kitchen window-sill”. The novel is not exactly a self-portrait—Warner's fiction is never overtly autobiographical—but it is possible to connect Lolly's stand against “habit and the cowardice of compunction”, her imaginative awakening and growing awareness of being “different”, with Warner's recognition both of her gift as a poet and, possibly, of her homosexuality. She made the “discovery that it was possible to write poetry” in 1922 during a month spent exploring the Essex marshes; so when, a couple of years later, she described how even in Lolly's dreary London existence

the ruling power of her life had assaulted her with dreams and intimations, calling her imagination out from the warm room to wander in darkened fields and by desolate sea-bords, through marshes and fens, and along the outskirts of brooding woods,

she was almost certainly writing from her own experience.

Born in 1893, the only child of a master at Harrow, Warner's first ambition was to be a composer. If the First World War had not intervened she would have gone to Germany to study with Schoenberg. As it was she became a musicologist, one of four editors of OUP's ten-volume Tudor Church Music, “romantically engaged in tracing, scoring and collating Masses, Motets and so on by the Henrician and Elizabethan composers, which only exist in contemporary Mss part-books”, as she put it in a note for a publisher's blurb. It was, she admitted, a hoard of throw-away sheets of the “beautiful smooth white photographic paper” used for her work that first inspired her to write down poems. She showed some of them to her friend David Garnett and he suggested sending them to Chatto and Windus.

The resulting interview with Charles Prentice, then head of the firm, was, she wrote in a letter of 1924, “like a nightmare, or a religious ceremony”. Prentice was impressed with both the objectivity and the variety of her work and he published her first collection The Espalier in 1925. This was followed by Time Importuned (1928), Opus 7 (1931), Whether a Dove or Seagull (with Valentine Ackland, 1933), Boxwood (1957), King Duffus and Other Poems (a pamphlet, 1968) and Twelve Poems (1980). Warner also published seven novels, a much acclaimed biography of T. H. White and numerous short stories—144 of them in the New Yorker.

During her lifetime her reputation was founded almost entirely on her prose. The posthumous publication of the marvellous Twelve Poems, however, suggested that her earlier poetry deserved fresh attention; and now with Carcanet's publication of her Collected Poems it is possible to consider her poetic achievement as a whole.

Appearing at the same time, Warner's Letters might be expected to provide some insights into the poems. In fact they are much more revealing about her prose. The only real clue to the poetry is provided by one letter in which she describes tidying up while “I sing that poem of Emily Dickinson's, The solemnest of industries enacted here on earth”. It is Dickinson's voice that seems so often to be lurking behind the faux-naïf rhythms and observations of her first two volumes. Other echoes are of de la Mare. Crabbe, and the Metaphysical poets—reflected in her fondness for conceits. It is probably true to argue though, as Claire Harman does in her introduction to the Collected Poems, that “as far as Warner was ‘like’ any other poet in her early years, she was likest to Hardy”.

Like Hardy, Warner is obsessively concerned with craftsmanship, with the “making” of a poem. Like Hardy she exploits the ballad for its ironic and, in a poem such as “The Image”, progressively chilling effects. She is also adept at mixing the macabre and comic: “The Country Churchyard”, for example, recalls the grim humour of Hardy's talking dead. “Ghosts at Chaldon Herring” with its wry reflections on the pairs of dead lovers who

                    choose
Thus their mouldered dears
To meet again
Whom long misuse
Of marriage, taunts and tears
And the slow grudge of age
Warped and estranged

is Hardyesque, and yet at the same time it could almost be a criticism of his desire to create a fantasy past with Emma; the poem's unblinkered dénouement exposes the lovers' newfound togetherness as a delusion.

In poem after poem Warner either pricks the romantic bubble or undermines the conventional point of view. Least successful of the early poems are those in which she attempts to convey the complexities of her own feelings. Either she is unsatisfyingly evasive, or she works too hard at an elaborate conceit (in “The Possession”, for example), or, in the case of the ambitious “The Virgin and the Scales”, there's an uneasy alliance between anecdote and parable.

The quality of “immediacy” that Warner found in the writers she most admired—Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, for example—results, as she argued in a talk on “Women as Writers” included in the Appendix to the Collected Poems, only when the reader is “no longer aware of the author's chaperoning presence”. In her own work this happens most often when her imagination is fixed on something other than herself: the sound of a lawn-mower in “Sad Green”, “a dairy maid who, it was said, would yield herself to any wanderer who chanced to come to her lonely dwelling” in “Nelly Trim”.

Warner discovered Crabbe when, “poor, hungry and sensual”, as she put it, she was first living in London. “I read him”, she wrote to a friend, “as though I were writing him; and there is no comparable excitement to that.” Opus 7, a long poem in rhyming couplets relating the tale of Rebecca Random who “lived on bread and lived for gin”, was presumably the direct result of this enthusiasm. It contains some nice contemporary touches—a Daily Mail headline: Buckingham Palace Drinking Lemonade?, a trip to the local Woolworth's to buy brightly coloured packets of seeds—but the poem as a whole suffers from the dusty air of pastiche.

Whether a Dove or Seagull (1933) was a joint venture with her companion/lover Valentine Ackland in which the two women concealed their authorship of individual poems and for this reason it has been excluded from the Collected Poems. The huge gap between this volume and Boxwood (1957)—twenty-one short poems written to accompany a collection of wood-cuts by Reynolds Stone—suggests that from then on she thought of herself primarily as a novelist and short-story writer, not as a poet. Occasional poems appeared in magazines but many of them, especially those written in the 1930s, were heavily influenced by Edward Thomas (“Mangolds”, for example, or “Here in the Corner of the Field …”). “Walking through Meadows …”, one of a group of poems that deals with the Spanish Civil War (she and Valentine Ackland were both at that time Communists and sympathizers with the Republican cause), seems to be an attempt to adapt “As the Team's Head Brass” to that conflict. As with nearly all her attempts to reproduce Thomas's conversational manner it is wordy and laboured. Her poems were far more successful when she stuck to her own sparer, more “musical” style.

The publication dates of Boxwood (1957), King Duffus (1968) and Last Poems (1981) are partly misleading. There are poems in all three which date from the 1940s. The title poem of King Duffus, for example, as well as “Anne Donne” and “Lady Macbeth's Daughter” are from a group entitled “Seven Conjectural Readings” of 1948, three more of which—“The Wife of King Heleos”, “Monsieur de Grignan” and “A Leper”—are included in the section of “Uncollected and Unpublished Poems”. Like the extraordinary “Gloriana Dying” (Twelve Poems) they are all dramatic monologues. Whereas the usual role of protagonists in dramatic monologues is to disclose, albeit inadvertently, their own misdeeds or failings, Warner's characters are not agents but victims. Their function is not to set up a tension between the reader's sympathy and judgment—we are meant to sympathize with them—but to challenge the received view of things. Thus King Duffus, restored to health when the hags who have been slowly melting his waxen image are put to death, complains at being summoned back to his “vexed kingdom” from a state where, he claims,

My crown lay lightly on my brow as a clot of
                                                                                                                                            foam.
My wide mantle was yellow as the flowers of
                                                                                                              the broom.
Hale and holy I was in mind and limb.

The Leper, instead of welcoming his cure, resents the return to sensation (“Silvered in my snail shell / I was almost at peace”). Monsieur Grignan, husband to Madame de Sévigné's daughter, protests that he is already “A letter back cypher, the man of her mother's daughter, / The man who unloosed the doves, and remembered for that alone.”

For forty years Warner, again like Hardy, went on using the same forms—ballad, folk-song, monologue, lyric. The language of some of the early poems is as taut and economical as the later ones; the poems in King Duffus and Twelve Poems are not different, just consistently better. Whether writing about her own approaching death (“Azrael”), or voicing the thoughts of the dying Queen Elizabeth I as she lies on the floor (“How tall my people are! Like a race of trees / They sway, sigh, nod heads, rustle above me”), or of a mother sitting in her squalid cottage, flies crawling on the ceiling, sagging paper on the walls, singing to a child whose eyes are like “jewels new-fetched from the dark”, or telling the story of Earl Cassilis's Lady who runs away on to the heath not for pleasure, or glamour, or even because she is unhappy, but because “I remembered I was young / And had to put myself into a song” the effect is, to use her own words about another writer, of “a queer brilliant verisimilitude”.

If Warner's best poems succeed by her absence then the opposite is true of her letters, which effervesce with personality. Edited by William Maxwell (her one-time editor on the New Yorker and a recipient of some letters) and dating from 1921 until just before her death in 1978, they form the record of what was ostensibly a retired and uneventful life in the country. Incident is provided by the war (firewatching, the problems of what to cook and so on), by trips abroad, unwelcome visits from relations, by the ups and downs of a writer's life (“I am beginning to feel as though I had plighted my vows to a refrigerator”, she complained to Maxwell in 1947, depressed by the New Yorker's dilatory response); but what really makes these letters come alive is Warner's capacity to turn the stuff of ordinary existence into a stream of perceptive, witty, compassionate and sometimes tart observation.

The contrast Claire Harman notes between the quiet tones of Warner's poems and her “sharp and fast-moving” prose is particularly evident when it comes to her letters. Some of them, though, almost are poems—the list of things: “a hamper of pawpaws, a jar of Guatemala honey, half a dozen hibiscus bushes, an Indian Baby, some snow off a volcano, three hummingbirds, and one hundred and forty-four (twelve dozen) yards of blue convolvulus. And a pink sunshade” she wants her friend Paul Nordoff to send her from Central America, for example—and it is tempting to speculate on what the effect might have been if she had allowed some of their exuberance to spill over into the restrained, well-wrought, timeless world of her poems. More real cause for regret, however, considering the strangely compelling quality of her best work, is that poetry was for most of her life a peripheral and not a major concern.