A short life of the author
Florence Margaret Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), known as Stevie Smith, was an English poet and novelist whose work defies virtually every category available to criticism. Her poems are simultaneously comic and devastating, childlike and sophisticated, formally naive and technically precise. She wrote about death, God, loneliness, suburban life, and the English character with a voice so distinctive that a single line is instantly recognisable. She illustrated her poems with her own scratchy, whimsical line drawings, which are inseparable from the poetry itself.
Life
Smith was born in Hull but moved to Palmers Green, a north London suburb, at the age of three. She lived in the same house — 1 Avondale Road — for the rest of her life, sharing it with her beloved “Lion Aunt,” Margaret Annie Spear, who raised her after her mother’s death and her father’s desertion. This suburban life — quiet, routine, enclosed — was both the subject and the condition of her poetry.
She worked as a private secretary to the publishers Newnes, Pearson from 1923 to 1953, and the boredom and confinement of office life pervades her fiction. She never married, had a small circle of devoted friends, and lived a life of outward uneventfulness that generated some of the most startling poetry of the century.
By the 1960s she had become a celebrated public performer, reading her poems in a sing-song, incantatory style that enchanted audiences. She won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1969 and died in 1971 from a brain tumour.
”Not Waving but Drowning”
Smith’s most famous poem — and one of the most widely known poems of the twentieth century — is about a dead man of whom people say, “He always loved larking.” The man responds from beyond death: “I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning.” In eight lines, Smith captures the chasm between social performance and inner despair — the way people drown in plain sight while those around them mistake their distress for comedy.
The poem’s power lies in its compression and its refusal to sentimentalise. It is at once a tiny narrative, a philosophical observation, and a darkly comic vignette. It has become proverbial — “not waving but drowning” has entered common English.
The Poetry
Smith published nine collections of poetry between 1937 and 1972. Her poetic voice is unlike anything else in English: it draws on nursery rhymes, hymns, ballads, fairy tales, and nonsense verse, but turns these apparently innocent forms toward subjects — suicide, the longing for death, the absence of God, the cruelty of human relationships — that their surface lightness makes more, not less, disturbing.
Key poems include “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock” (a meditation on the interruption of creative work), “The Frog Prince” (the prince who does not want to be disenchanted), “Scorpion” (a late poem about being mistaken for something one is not), and “Away, Melancholy” (a surprisingly affirmative poem about choosing life).
Her relationship with death is the central theme. Smith wrote about death with a combination of longing, humour, and philosophical seriousness that is unique. Death in her poems is not tragic but tempting — a friend, a relief, an alternative to the tedium of living. This tone — cheerful nihilism, or what she called “an ordinary mind in an extraordinary situation” — is what makes her poetry both unsettling and deeply consoling.
Novel on Yellow Paper (1936)
Smith’s first novel — written at speed, on the yellow paper her employer used for carbon copies — is a stream-of-consciousness monologue by Pompey Casmilus, a secretary in a London office. The novel is digressive, witty, and defiantly unplotted. It was compared to Virginia Woolf, though Smith’s voice is earthier and funnier than Woolf’s. Two further novels followed — Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949) — but Smith’s fiction has always been overshadowed by her poetry.
The Drawings
Smith’s line drawings — scratchy, naive, sometimes grotesque figures — are integral to her published work. She often drew the illustrations before writing the poems, or used existing drawings as prompts. They are not decorative: they create a visual counterpoint to the poetry that reinforces the work’s characteristic blend of innocence and menace.
Critical Standing
Smith was largely marginalised by the literary establishment during her lifetime — too eccentric for the Movement poets, too English for the Americans, too comic for the confessional school. But her reputation has grown steadily since her death. Seamus Heaney admired her; Glenda Jackson played her in a 1978 film (Stevie); Hermione Lee wrote an influential critical study. She is now recognised as one of the most original English poets of the twentieth century — a writer whose apparent simplicity conceals enormous sophistication and whose emotional range, from hilarity to desolation, is wider than that of most of her more celebrated contemporaries.
Collecting Smith
A Good Time Was Had by All (1937, Cape) — her debut poetry collection — is scarce in first edition, bringing $200–$500. Novel on Yellow Paper (1936, Cape) first editions bring $100–$300. Not Waving but Drowning (1957, André Deutsch) is the most sought collection. The Collected Poems (Allen Lane, 1975) is the standard edition. Smith’s original drawings occasionally appear at auction.