“The Afflicted Imagination”: Moments in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings

Abstract

“The Afflicted Imagination”Moments in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings Dana Greene (bio) Largely unknown in the United States, Elizabeth Jennings was one of the best-selling poets in twentieth-century England. She extended poetry to a general audience through her forty-eight volumes of poetry, prose, and one anthology, and by appearing on the radio, giving public readings, and being included on the A Level syllabus in schools. At her death, all major newspapers in the United Kingdom ran long obituaries documenting her achievements. It is estimated that 230,000 copies of her books were sold. The most recent edition of her Collected Poems contains just under 1,200 published poems.1 By conservative estimate there are also some 30,000 unpublished notebook poems, ones she called “still-born poems.”2 She wrote several poems a day, and when full of anxiety and psychologically fragile she wrote more. For example, in a two-month period in the late 1970s she wrote just under 500 poems. She was prolific. Readers were attracted to her verse because it was about ordinary life, and was clear, genuine, and neither ironic nor sentimental. Her publisher Michael Schmidt claimed she was “the most unconditionally loved writer of her generation.”3 Originally associated with the poets of the Movement—Philip [End Page 75] Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and others—she was set apart from these contemporaries by sex, as the only woman in the group, and by religion, as the only Roman Catholic. Since Jennings did not consider herself part of the Movement,4 and since she belonged to no other contemporary poetic tradition, she attached herself to poets of the past—George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Against extraordinary odds of poverty, illness, loneliness, and discrimination, she persisted in her poetic vocation. This alone gives reason for her to be remembered. Her religion, which was central to her poetry, also contributed both to her isolation and to her achievement. As Dana Gioia suggests, Jennings is England’s finest modern Catholic poet, the one who brought the Catholic perspective to the mainstream of late twentieth-century English poetry.5 For Jennings, poetry was truth seeking, communion, and communication with others. It had nothing to do with self-pity or therapy and was not confessional. She contended that although her poems were personal, they were not autobiographical. The poem was not the poet, although it found a temporary home in the poet;6 a little part of one’s life was caught within it. She wrote that the poet’s life skips in between the lines of the poem, even if one tries to keep it out.7 For her the poem was personal experience, shaped and molded and thereby universalized and made available for others. She admitted that her life was in every book she wrote, that writing poetry was never separate from the life one leads, and that her love poems were about real people.8 Her published poetry, and even more so her unpublished notebook poems, become autobiographical evidence when these experiences are corroborated by other sources. Elizabeth Jennings’s life made her poems possible and her poems make her life memorable. In her, there was little gap between life and work. Her life was poetry. Jennings was a woman of great complexity. She could be warm, gracious, loyal, welcoming, generous, and grateful. When not depressed, she was good company. But she was also vulnerable, [End Page 76] stubborn, dependent, and demanding. She was childlike and childish, which sometimes made her difficult for others to bear. As regards her work and vocation, she was unbending, tenacious, and, as Anne Stevenson correctly surmised, tough.9 Jennings gave the first iteration of her autobiography the title “The Inward War.” It was probably written in 1967 when she was forty-two years old.10 This title was inspired by a line from Marianne Moore—“There never was a war that was not inward.” Subsequent iterations of this autobiography had different titles. The one she tried to hawk to publishers was called “As I Am.”11 This, she said, was how friends saw her, as she was. Several years later she entitled her...