SOURCE: "Stevie Smith and the Gleeful Macabre," in Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 111, No. 4, 1978, pp. 36-49.

Florence Margaret Smith, who retained her nickname Stevie throughout her adulthood and published under its androgynous rubric, reveled in incongruities. Her poetic speakers shift from male to female, conformist to nonconformist, simple to complex, and adult to child; at times, indeed they are both alive and dead. She frequently set her poems to well-known tunes and sang them rather tonelessly to willing listeners, and she often appended sketches whose relationship to the text is problematical. Her syntax is odd, her rhymes unexpected, her numbers idiosyncratic, and as a result her work is nearly always lively and original. Her poems have an immediate appeal, and yet many of them bear considerable re-reading. The frequent incongruities chiefly account for this double effect.

Smith's odd juxtapositions and her love of paradox invite comparison—not infrequently pursued by...