I am not aware that Stevie Smith’s poems have ever received serious critical assessment, though recently I have seen signs that this may not be far off. They are certainly presented with that hallmark of frivolity, drawings, and if my friends had been asked to place Miss Smith they would no doubt have put her somewhere in the uneasy marches between humorous and children’s. She has also written a book about cats, which as far as I am concerned casts a shadow over even the most illustrious name. Nevertheless, her poems, to my mind, have two virtues: they are completely original, and now and again they are moving. These qualities alone set them above 95 per cent of present-day output.

Her mode of writing, broadly speaking, is that of the fausse-naïve, the ‘feminine’ doodler or jotter who puts down everything as it strikes her, no matter how silly or tragic, in a kind of Gertrude Stein-Daisy Ashford-Lorelei Lee way.

Sir John Betjeman was more widely loved—he was more lovable—but the bookish were proud of Stevie as the British sometimes are of an old concrete pillbox that is allowed to go on disfiguring an otherwise perfect cow pasture because it reminds them of a time when they felt united...

Throughout her work, free-verse poems alternate with more formal compositions, but the free verse always gestures towards form and the forms always wander off. She strove industriously to make it look as if she didn’t quite know what she was doing. She knew exactly. Her poetry has the vivid appeal of the Douanier Rousseau’s pictures or Mussorgsky’s music, but where they lacked schooling she only pretended to lack it. Closer analogies would be with Picasso painting clowns or Stravinsky writing ballets. She knew everything about how poetry had sounded in the past, and could assemble echoes with the assurance of any other modern artist.