Poems with drawings spanning the artists lifetime.

When Stevie Smith died in 1971 she was one of the twentieth-century's most popular poets; many of her poems have been widely anthologised, and 'Not Waving but Drowning' remains one of the nation's favourite poems to this day. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, her characteristically lightning-fast changes in tone take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling. In this wholly new edition of her work, Smith scholar Will May collects together the illustrations and poems from her original published volumes for the first time, recording fascinating details about their provenance, and describing the various versions Smith presented both on stage and page. Including over 500 works from Smith's 35-year career, The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith is the essential edition of modern poetry's most distinctive voice. I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. - 'Not Waving but Drowning'

The essential edition of one of modern poetry’s most distinctive voices: all Stevie Smith’s flabbergasting poems, now in paperback Stevie Smith is among the most popular British poets of the twentieth century. Her poem “Not Waving but Drowning” has been widely anthologized, and her life was celebrated in the classic movie Stevie. This new and updated edition includes hundreds of works from her thirty-five-year career. In addition to the poems and illustrations from all her published volumes, the Smith scholar Will May discovered never-before-published verses and provides fascinating details about their provenance. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, Stevie Smith’s poems take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling.

The British poet Stevie Smith, as her many readers well know, sprinkled her drawings throughout her poetry collections. In this sketchbook, Some Are More Human Than Others, she did the opposite--she spiced her drawings with words. Together they resound with what Robert Lowell described as Smith's "unique and cheerfully gruesome voice" and open up a little world of peculiar experience: something somber and something gay, innocent and cruel--truths of our world trapped off guard.

The author explores the connections between Smiths work and mass media production; twentieth-century historical events; her romantic and Victorian predecessors; and such contemporaries as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, and Evelyn Waugh. By presenting Smith in the cultural milieu surrounding World War II, Severin illuminates the still dark period of British womens writing from 1930 to 1960. Focusing on the complete works of Stevie Smith, Severin suggests that Smiths boundary-crossing art forms, which transgress genres and even media, represent an attempt to undo the coherence of femininity as defined in the conservative period of World War II.

Designed especially for students but also for the general reader, this selection draws on the whole of Smith's output in poetry, prose, and drawings from Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) to Scorpion (1972), complemented by biographical and textual notes.