Poem Of The Week: 'Emily Writes Such A Good Letter' By Stevie Smith (1902-71)

Stevie Smith’s poem of loneliness and isolation is a masterwork of revelation by inference. The stilted cultural architecture of nineteen thirties Kent is given up in stage whispers by a narrator whose, on the surface vacuous, monologue is shadowed by the bitterness of failure.

The philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin would have had a field day with conflicting ‘voice’ in Smith’s stream of consciousness, for the narrator’s own is everywhere counterposed by the suggestion of others, whose lives and experiences are mediated in the retelling: filtered through the single dimension of her pinched provincialism, the received picture is necessarily skewed, the ‘antagonists’ – the char, the vicar, Maud – condemned to an uneasy silence.

We hear tonal echoes of the vocal interjections of Eliot’s Wasteland here, and, in Smith’s skilled rendering – the poem, like ad hoc speech, is unpunctuated, leaving a deliberate and resonant hiatus at ‘It was cancer’ – we are privy to an (in)eloquence of twittering in a box, a manifestation of a mannered existence, strangled by the prevailing social appurtenances of the Home Counties middle or upper middle classes.

Many of Smith’s poems are characterised by an anxiety of mental isolation, and in ‘Emily Writes Such a Good Letter’, a sense of loss is borne out with the dramatic efficacy of a Talking Heads, direct-to-camera vignette. That we respond to the narrator’s voice with a complex mixture of contempt and empathy gives notice of a subtle poetic mind, with a predilection for irony and ambiguity.


‘Emily Writes Such a Good Letter’ is taken from British Poetry since 1945 and is published by Penguin Books.