2 - Post/Modernist rhythms and voices: Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith to Jo Shapcott and Selima Hill

Summary

There is a strand of twentieth-century women’s poetry that foregrounds sounds and rhythms and uses them to evoke a self-consciously problematic sense of a speaking voice. Michael Schmidt emphasises the structural importance of rhythm for both Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) and Stevie Smith (1902–71), and quotes Sitwell as saying that rhythm is ‘one of the principal translators between dream and reality’, and that the Facade poems are ‘patterns of sound’. He says that the ‘most striking characteristic’ of Stevie Smith ’s work ‘is the rhythm, a speech rhythm slipping naturally into metre and out again, a rhythm so strong that it overrides considerations of syntax and punctuation and – in releasing language from its formal structures – finds new forms, new tones’. Sitwell helped to initiate a female tradition in which poetic sound and rhythm are privileged and so wielded as to disrupt routine patterns of meaning. Smith continued in this vein and extended a caricatural tendency already present in Sitwell but pushed further, in combination with Smith’s discordant music and a deceptive ingenuousness, to achieve a confrontational satire which at times is self-consciously childish. The experimental heightening of poetic sound, in these earlier writers, combined with their use of the playful yet angry and even contemptuous imagery of caricature, has influenced more recent poets in the creation of an identifiably feminine postmodernism. The silliness and shrillness of the music of Sitwell and Smith – which turns feminine self-parody into satire of masculine assumptions of its own rational authority, and derisive questioning of masculine dismissiveness towards what it regards as feminine inchoateness – prepares the way for the dancing and demented cows of Jo Shapcott (b. 1953) and Selima Hill (b. 1945), the uproarious sing-song of their flaky carnival.