Elizabeth Jennings

The British poet Elizabeth Jennings has published more than 20 books of poetry since the 1950s. She writes short, meditative lyrics that are known for their simplicity, control, and range of feeling. These qualities have linked Jennings to a group of poets, usually referred to as The Movement, who were writing in England during the 1940s and 1950s. The members of this group, poets like Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, and John Wain, never consciously formed a movement, but their poetry reveals a shared love for simplicity and an acceptance of regular meter and rhyme.

Elizabeth Jennings was born on July 18, 1926, in Boston, Lincolnshire. She claims that she discovered poetry at age 13 and began to write, encouraged by a teacher and her uncle. Jennings attended St. Anne's College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1949 and was greatly stimulated by the intellectual atmosphere there. It was at this time that she began to associate with poets of The Movement; some of her first published poems appeared in Oxford Poetry 1948, edited by Kingsley Amis and James Michie. Jennings worked in the Oxford City Library from 1950 to 1958 and as a publisher's reader from 1958 to 1960. During this time she published three books of poetry and a book for children entitled "Let's Have Some Poetry!" (1960). In the early 1960s, Jennings suffered a breakdown and was confined to a hospital. The poems she wrote after her release are collected in Recoveries (1964) and The Mind Has Mountains (1966).

Jennings is an extremely prolific poet. She writes quickly, revises little, and claims that her poems "come out very clean." She differs from the other poets of The Movement in her devotion to Roman Catholicism, a theme that pervades much of her poetry. Jennings also writes about friendship, relationships, places, and art. She does not write autobiographical poems, but her religious concerns, mental illness, and other personal experiences influence the themes and insights expressed in her poetry.

Today the children begin to hope for snow
And look in the sky for auguries of it.
It is not for such omens that we wait,
Our world may not be settled by the slow
Falling of flakes to lie across our thought.
And even if the snow comes down indeed
We shall still stand behind a pane of glass
Untouched by it, and watch the children press
Their image on the drifts the snow has laid
On a winter they think they have made.
This is a wise illusion. Better to
Believe the near world is created by
A wish, a shaping hand, a certain eye,
Than hide in the mind's corner as we do
As though there were no world, no fall of snow.

You cannot speak for no one knows
Your language. You must try to catch
By glances or a steadfast gaze
The attitude of those you watch.
No conversations can amaze:
Noises may find you but not speech.

Now you have circled silence, stare
With all the subtlety of sight.
Noise may trap ears but eye discerns
How someone on his elbows turns
And in the moon's long exile here
Touches another in the night.

First Love

Thinking Of Love

Answers

Elizabeth Jennings

One of Britain's most popular poets, her work was famed for its imagery, logic and emotional sensitivity

Grevel Lindop
Wednesday October 31, 2001
The Guardian

"Only one thing must be cast out," wrote the poet Elizabeth Jennings, who has died aged 75, "and that is the vague. Only true clarity reaches to the heights and the depths of human, and more than human, understanding." The words are from her study of 20th-century authors, Seven Men Of Vision (1976), which included reflections on Yeats, DH Lawrence, Pasternak and St-Exupéry; but they sum up perfectly the aspirations and achievements of her own poetry.

Elizabeth's father, Henry Cecil Jennings, was chief medical officer for her birthplace of Boston, Lincolnshire, whose environs - "a flat land of sugarbeet and tulips" - were to be vividly recreated in some of her later poems. When she was six, the family moved to Oxford, where she attended Oxford high school and discovered poetry. Delighted, at first, by the rhythms of Chesterton's Battle Of Lepanto, she soon moved on to Keats and Coleridge, and began to write her own poems.

When she was 13, the second world war broke out; at about the same time, she began to find religion - she was born a Catholic - "a real and important part of my life, and because it was important, it tended to give me a lot of worries". Spiritual concerns and a sense of vulnerability, often issuing in a profound sensitivity to the suffering of others, would become important elements in her output.

After reading English at St Anne's College, Oxford, Jennings became a librarian at Oxford city library. Poetry was, by now, her overriding interest, and her first collection, Poems (1953), published by the Fantasy Press, drew the attention of Robert Conquest, who included her work with that of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, John Wain and others in his 1956 New Lines anthology, launching what became known as "The Movement".

Jennings was the sole female contributor, and the short, first poem in her section of the book, Delay (which remained the opener of all her subsequent collected and selected volumes) had the unmistakable note of a classic.

From its opening scientific proposition, "The radiance of that star that leans on me/ Was shining years ago", to its sad and muted conclusion that "love arrived may find us somewhere else", the eight-line poem epitomised the path her work would take: the path of flawless traditional verse-technique, sharp imagery, logical thought and emotional sensitivity.

"The Movement", if it was one, faded from prominence as poets went their separate ways, but Jennings continued, with remarkable tenacity, to work in her own deceptively simple style, developing a uniquely personal voice.

She left librarianship to become a publisher's reader for Chatto and Windus from 1958 to 1960, and thereafter wrote regular poetry reviews for the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, poems were written steadily and prolifically - "I write fast and revise very little," she confessed - with a new volume appearing every two or three years, an oeuvre which amounted at last to nearly 30 books.

Jennings' work, though consistent in tone, was not repetitious. There was a steady growth in emotional intensity, and in her willingness to tackle uncomfortable subjects, and each volume contained at least a few poems of startling power, as in One Flesh (published in The Mind Has Mountains, 1966), where the sadly and lovingly described elderly couple "Lying apart now, each in a separate bed" are identified at last as the poet's parents, "Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold."

A breakdown in the early 1960s resulted in some ill-judged experimental poems, later suppressed, in jagged typographical forms, but also in the superb Sequence In Hospital, published in Recoveries (1964), which explores the experience of hospitalisation with unsparing clarity: "What to say first? I learnt I was afraid/ Fear became absolute and I became/ Subject to it; it beckoned, I obeyed." Travel in Italy led to a lasting engagement with Italian culture and a translation of The Sonnets Of Michelangelo (1961), which is still the standard version and remains unsurpassed.

Becoming, almost without noticing it, one of Britain's most popular poets, Jennings was also, from the 1960s, an important mentor to generations of student poets, who would be invited for tea and sympathetic criticism at her modest north Oxford lodgings, whose every horizontal surface was crowded with a fantastic array of china knick-knacks, glass animals, doll's house furniture and musical boxes - the "collections" she gave as her hobby in Who's Who.

She never married, though there was an early engagement, and Oxford remained the centre of her world. But, within modest geographical limits, she lived a life rich in culture and friendship. She found poetry readings an ordeal, and avoided most literary gatherings. None the less, she was a much-loved part of the Oxford scene until the mid-90s. A familiar figure on the bus to Stratford-upon-Avon, she rarely missed a new production of Shakespeare; a connoisseur of ice-cream, she was a regular at the Häagen-Daz's ice-cream parlour. So avid was her filmgoing that her local cinema, in Walton Street, was rumoured to have given her a free pass for life.

Her later work showed increased breadth and vigour. From the aptly named Extending The Territory (1985) onwards, she often wrote poems in flowing, free-verse lines, recollecting childhood and celebrating nature with a thoughtful nostalgia reminiscent of Rilke: "I watched as a child the slow/ Leaves turning and taking the sun, and the autumn bonfires,/ The whips of wind blowing a landscape away./ Always it was the half-seen, the just-heard which enthralled."

She received the WH Smith literary award in 1987 for her second Collected Poems (the first had appeared in 1967, and so ruthless was her self-criticism that the later volume was actually shorter), and, in 1992, the CBE. Despite a gradual decline in health, she continued to write with undiminished vigour and sharpness.

Her last volume, Timely Issues, published earlier this year, characteristically contains not only tributes to Hopkins, Traherne and Robert Graves but a poem of shrewd advice "To Any Newish Poet".