SOURCE: "Play, Fantasy and Strange Laughter: Stevie Smith's Uncomfortable Poetry," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, Autumn, 1986, pp. 85-96.

 Miss Pauncefort sang at the top of her voice
(Sing tirry-lirry-lirry down the lane)
And nobody knew what she sang about
(Sing tirry-lirry-lirry all the same) 

Stevie Smith's off-key, enigmatically childish poetry has always irritated as much as charmed her critics. It fits no obvious category and, though Smith's popularity as a novelist as well as a poet has continued to grow since her death in 1971, her critical reputation remains ambiguous and unconfirmed. Superficially, her poems seem as familiar and easily accessible as the snippets of English life and the nursery jingles out of which they are constructed. At the same time, taken together, they constitute a stubbornly self-contained body of work that shows few signs of involvement in 'the gang warfare' that preoccupied British and American writers immediately before...