This was Stevie Smith’s first volume of poetry, finally published by Jonathan Cape after the huge success of her novel
Novel on Yellow Paper(1936) from the previous year. Smith had been writing poetry since the late 1920s, and the volume represented a selection of seventy-six poems from a huge amount of unpublished material, or what Smith herself described as “about ten years of illicit office scribbling”. The most visually striking aspect of the book is Smith’s illustrations, which were to accompany the nine subsequent volumes published during her lifetime. The act of “higher doodling”, as Smith referred to her drawing process, was an important part of her work, as she often found that the existing illustrations provoked yet more poems. Although their comic amateurishness…
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Citation: May, William. "A Good Time was Had By All". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 September 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9927, accessed 25 November 2024.]
