Drawing away from Lear: Stevie Smith's Deceitful Echo

Abstract

Stevie Smith certainly drew on Lear’s nonsense poetry, but refused to be drawn on its similarity to her own illustrated verse, dismissing him as a ‘deceitful echo’ in the blurb she wrote for her Selected Poems (1962). Her enigmatic sketches of female faces mimic the baffled wives of his nonsense verse while also reflecting her uneasy response to his work. For a number of twentieth-century poets, Lear’s levity was an influence to be made light of or denied: contemporary critics did not afford everyone the tonal range of an Eliot or Auden. The ‘amiable’ Lear is a threat or admonition when identified as a precursor, not only undermining the seriousness of a poet but their distinctiveness. To be considered whimsical is unfortunate; to be considered whimsical and derivative is careless. This problem is compounded for the poet-illustrator. One of the many ways we might describe the relationship between a poem and its illustration is imitative; the illustrated poem with an acknowledged forefather becomes a very pale sort of imitation. This chapter considers the drawings and poems of Stevie Smith as anxious encounters with Lear and his legacy. It uses the particular example of Smith to uncover a number of Lear-ish echoes in twentieth-century poetry: often, it will suggest, we see and hear Lear in the writers most at pains to insist our eyes and ears are deceiving us

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