Elizabeth Daryush and the Company She Keeps

Abstract

In 1974, John Matthias reviewed a selection of new publications for Poetry, including Selected Poems by Elizabeth Daryush from Verses I–VI (1972). The volume gathered all the poems Daryush wished to preserve of her six collections published in the 1930s. Even taking this belatedness into account, however, Matthias was struck by how out of joint with the time these poems seemed. Alongside the other poets in the review, which included work by Edwin Morgan and Barbara Guest, Daryush stood out as an anachronism, ‘looking rather like someone who has suddenly stepped out of the wrong century to find herself at the wrong party wearing the wrong clothes’: ‘There she stands in her brocades speaking her o’er and ’twixts and ’tweens in her very proper accent’, like ‘somebody’s ancient aunt or somebody’s grannie.’1 Daryush would never have stood for the word ‘grannie’, but Matthias’s facetiousness highlights the difficulties modern readers are likely to have with her work. Her career as a poet spanned a period of intense political conflict and radical social change, but her poems only ever register these contexts obliquely, seemingly out of step with the dominant tendencies in Anglo-American poetry at any given moment. Her first three volumes appeared in 1912 and 1916, though she later suppressed them, and her final book of new poems was published in 1971. She published six books of poetry with Oxford University Press in the 1930s, which seem not to have attracted much notice from a reading public grappling with the rise of fascism, class consciousness, and anthologies like John Lehmann’s New Writing. Yvor Winters edited a Selected Poems in 1948, which garnered a few reviews in literary magazines in America, but looked like it belonged to a previous era when read alongside the Pisan Cantos, Dylan Thomas, or Robert Lowell. It’s likely too that her association with the Winters circle in America and The Movement in the UK influenced the lukewarm, slightly puzzled, reception that greeted Verses: Seventh Book, and the Selected and Collected Poems in the 1970s, all published by the newly established Carcanet Press. Daryush was never a dedicated follower of fashion, but that’s one of the reasons why her poetry amply repays the time we spend with it.