SMITH, John (Charles)

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Pseudonyms: C. Busby Smith. Nationality: British. Born: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, 5 April 1924. Education: St. James's Elementary School, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. Career: Director, 1946–58, managing director, 1959–71, and since 1972 advisory director, Christy and Moore Ltd. literary agents, London. Editor, Poetry Review, London, 1962–65. Awards: Adam International prize, 1953. Address: 3 Adelaide Court, 15 Adelaide Crescent, Hove, Sussex, England.

Publications

Poetry

Gates of Beauty and Death (as C. Busby Smith). London, Fortune Press, 1948.

The Dark Side of Love. London, Hogarth Press, 1952.

The Birth of Venus. London, Hutchinson, 1954.

Excursus in Autumn. London, Hutchinson, 1958.

A Letter to Lao Tze. London, Hart Davis, 1961.

A Discreet Immorality. London, Hart Davis, 1965.

Five Songs of Resurrection. Privately printed, 1967.

Four Ritual Dances. Privately printed, 1968.

Entering Rooms. London, Chatto and Windus-Hogarth Press, 1973.

A Landscape of My Own: Selected Poems 1948–1982. London, Robson, 1982.

Songs for Simpletons. London, Robson, 1984.

Poems for Paul Klee. Oxford, Alembic Press, 1990.

Plays

The Mask of Glory (produced Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, 1956.

Mr. Smith's Apocalypse: A Jazz Cantata, music by Michael Garrick(produced Farnham, Surrey, 1969). London, Robbins Music, 1970.

The Stirring, music by Michael Garrick (produced Manchester, 1984).

Zodiac of Angels, music by Michael Garrick (produced Manchester, 1988).

Other

Jan le Witt: An Appreciation of His Work, with Herbert Read and JeanCassou. London, Routledge, 1971.

The Broken Fiddlestick (for children). London, Longman, 1971.

The Early Bird and the Worm (for children). London, Burke, 1972.

The Arts Betrayed. London, Herbert Press, and New York, Universe, 1978.

Cheesemaking in Scotland: A History. Clydebank, Scottish Dairy Association, 1995.

Editor, with William Kean Seymour, The Pattern of Poetry. London, Burke, 1963.

Editor, My Kind of Verse. London, Burke, 1965; New York, Macmillan, 1968.

Editor, Modern Love Poems. London, Studio Vista, 1966.

Editor, with William Kean Seymour, Happy Christmas. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, and London, Burke, 1968.

Editor, My Kind of Rhymes. London, Burke, 1972.

Editor, The Poets' Gift: Poems by the Crabbe Memorial Poetry Competition Judges, 1955–1985. Hadleigh, Suffolk Poetry Society, 1986.

Editor, A Feast of Poetry. London, Burke, 1988.

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Critical Study: In Literary Review, 38(2), winter 1995.

John Smith comments:

As briefly as possible, I would describe my poetry as lyrical, metaphysical, formal, sardonic.

*  *  *

The title poem of one of John Smith's early collections is "The Birth of Venus," an attractively Audenesque mythological piece:

Somewhat incredible seems the fable
   Of this great lady from the sea;
Could one so flushed with love be able
   To store such rich propensity
	In that damp element, cold and dead?
	Could Love arise from the grey sea-bed
   Or rank weed nourish such potency?...
 
Venus, most near and dear of all
   Those Goddesses whose lives we scan,
Keep for all time our hearts in thrall
   Wherein, at your birth, Love began.
      However great or proud he be
      Without you, Goddess from the sea,
   How pitiably small is man...

Love, human and divine, has remained Smith's central subject.

Smith is essentially a philosophical poet, his attention to love's human presence or absence always wedded to an awareness of its metaphysical significance. At times this awareness leads him into the use of excessively abstract language as he follows through a train of thought with a thoroughness that can lead to an uncomfortable rhythmic flatness:

I have said that all gifts are God given, yet deny God, 
And is this not a contradiction in terms?...
...I think we have to acknowledge
That a difference between the God I deny and ourselves
Lies in our love of innocence, his love of redemption.

It is typical of Smith, however, that in the very same poem ("The Holiness of the Heart's Affections") he should achieve a poetic idiom for the presentation of philosophical ideas that is both genuinely poetic and lucid in its articulation of complex processes of thought. It is of Eliot that we are then reminded:

Desire, or the implementation of desire,
Is it that which finally is divine: not that which is,
But that which would be, is about to become,
Which was not and is not and will not be,
Existing only in transubstantial state
Of apprehension never of comprehension?
And is this not in the last resort what love is,
Refined and essential, or brutal in the act:
A fusion of twin unjoinable lonelinesses?

The last striking phrase, reminiscent of the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals, is a key to much that is best in Smith's poems of human love. Especially fine is "The Face of Love," which examines such ideas with a formal grace and clarity of mind suggestive of Marvell, echoes of whom are quite often to be heard in Smith's work:

...
If, on a rash day, in an empty hall
	One of two lovers were constrained to draw
The other's likeness on the distempered wall
	So that a stranger might see what he saw,

The hand would falter and the bright eyes cloud
	With tears; a shock of grief his breath would
  smother.
Yet in that loss he'd know himself most proud:
	True lovers grow invisible to each other,

And their twin absences achieve that state
	Of love itself where no shape breaks between.
Each with the other fuses to create
	One face of love that sees not nor is seen.

On the other hand, a number of poems on the parting of lovers (e.g., "Gone," "Ending," "The Realization," and "First, Goodbye") take part of their particular poignancy from the implicit sense of the continuing presence of separation at the very heart of the closest of relationships. "The Holiness of the Heart's Affections" finds Smith denying "the presumptuous dogma that God is Love / In the glory of its reversal that Love is God." Love can be worshiped, however, only in full knowledge of its unattainability.

In Songs for Simpletons Smith's mythological imagination reasserts itself in a remarkable sequence of twenty-five lyrics that are densely allusive for all their seemingly simple language (the very title deliberately sets off appropriately Blakean resonances) and that, in the author's own words, concern themselves with "the dichotomy between Eros and Agape." The Jack and Jill of these poems occupy an archetypal world of emotion and act, where brutality and tenderness coexist, where sexual passion and spiritual mystery are elementally bound together. The sequence is a considerable and individual achievement and deserves more attention than it has received.

Elsewhere in Smith's work the reader is likely to be struck by such fables of existence and faith as "Prologue" or by sustained meditations such as "Snow" or "Thoughts from Torcello." A series of poems on works of art or painters (e.g., "Monet," "Bellini's Ecstasy of St. Francis in the Frick Museum and the Trees on the Way to Boston, 1978") gives full play to the poet's repeated encounters with the idea and presence of that God in whom he does not believe.

Smith's work is uneven, and a first encounter with it is probably best made in selection. For the period up to 1982 A Landscape of My Own fits the bill very well. The reader of the poems in that volume and in the later Songs for Simpletons will find in Smith a poet with a thorough and an alert mind and a largeness of subject that reward exploration.

—Glyn Pursglove