SOURCE: "Stevie Smith and the Anxiety of Intimacy," in The CEA Critic, Vol. 53, No. 2, Winter, 1991, pp. 22-31.

Upton is an American poet, educator, and critic. In the following essay, he analyzes the defining characteristics of Smith's verse, in particular her "anxiety over intimacy and self-disclosure."

By enacting separation and difference, Stevie Smith dramatizes a portrait of the poet as a destroyer of habitual assumptions about affiliation. Her most compelling and characteristic movements are departures rather than arrivals, endings rather than beginnings. Characteristically, her speakers demonstrate an anxiety over intimacy and selfdisclosure.

It is a critical commonplace to note that Smith cherishes unattractive attitudes: a child's rejection of her father ("Papa Loves Baby"); the seductiveness of suicide (e.g., "Tender Only to One" and "Is It Wise"); the guiltfree disposal of enemies ("From My Notes for a Series of Lectures on Murder"). She addresses enthrallment with nonhuman elements, an...