SOURCE: "The Poems of Agatha Christie," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 21, No. 3, Winter, 1987, pp. 103-10.

In the following essay, Bargainnier analyzes Christie's collection of poetry, discussing what her poems reveal about her personality.

In her autobiography Agatha Christie wrote, "The creative urge can come out in any form: in embroidery, in cooking of interesting dishes, in painting, drawing and sculpture, in composing music, as well as in writing books and stories. The only difference is that you can be a great deal more grand about some of these things than others." Christie was never "grand" about her detective fiction, and was even less so about her poetry. Yet in 1973, three years before her death, she permitted a small volume of her "collected" poems to be published. Christie's position as the most popular British writer ever deserves some analysis of her poems and their relationship, though slight, to...