Jennings, Elizabeth (Joan) 1926-2001

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JENNINGS, Elizabeth (Joan) 1926-2001

PERSONAL: Born July 18, 1926, in Boston, Lincolnshire, England; died, October 26, 2001; daughter of Henry Cecil Jennings (a physician). Education: St. Anne's College, Oxford, M.A. (with honors). Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Travel, art, theater, conversation.

CAREER: Oxford City Library, Oxford, England, assistant, 1950-58; Chatto & Windus (publishing firm), London, England, reader, 1958-60; poet and freelance writer, beginning 1961. Guildersleeve Lecturer, Barnard College, Columbia University, 1974.

MEMBER: Society of Authors.

AWARDS, HONORS: Arts Council award, 1953, for Poems; Somerset Maugham Award, 1956, for AWay of Looking; Arts Council bursary, 1965 and 1968; Richard Hillary Memorial Prize, 1966, for The Mind Has Mountains; Arts Council grant, 1972; W. H. Smith award, 1987, for Collected Poems, 1953-86; C.B.E.

WRITINGS:

Poems, Fantasy Press (Swinford, England), 1953.

A Way of Looking: Poems, Deutsch (London, England), 1955, Rinehart (New York, NY), 1956.

(Editor, with Dannie Abse and Stephen Spender) NewPoems 1956: A PEN Anthology, M. Joseph (London, England), 1956.

A Child and the Seashell, Feathered Serpent Press, 1957.

(Editor) The Batsford Book of Children's Verse, Batsford (London, England), 1958.

A Sense of the World: Poems, Deutsch (London, England), 1958, Rinehart (New York, NY), 1959.

Let's Have Some Poetry! (nonfiction), Museum Press (London, England), 1960.

Song for a Birth or a Death, and Other Poems, Deutsch (London, England), 1961, Dufour (New York, NY), 1962.

(Editor) An Anthology of Modern Verse, 1940-1960, Methuen (London, England), 1961.

Every Changing Shape, Deutsch (London, England), 1961.

Poetry Today, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1961.

(Translator) The Sonnets of Michelangelo, Folio Society, 1961, revised edition, Allison & Busby (London, England), 1969, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1970.

(With Lawrence Durrell and R. S. Thomas) PenguinModern Poets I, Penguin (New York, NY), 1962.

Recoveries: Poems, Dufour (New York, NY), 1964.

Frost, Oliver & Boyd (London, England), 1964, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1965.

Christian Poetry, Hawthorn (New York, NY), 1965, published as Christianity and Poetry, Burns & Oates (London, England), 1965.

The Mind Has Mountains, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1966.

The Secret Brother and Other Poems for Children, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1966.

Collected Poems, 1967, Dufour (New York, NY), 1967.

The Animals' Arrival, Dufour (New York, NY), 1969.

Lucidities, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1970. (Editor) A Choice of Christina Rossetti's Verse, Faber (London, England), 1970.

Hurt, Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1970.

(With others) Folio, Sceptre Press (London, England), 1971.

Relationships, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1972.

Growing-Points: New Poems, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1975.

Seven Men of Vision: An Appreciation (literary criticism), Harper (New York, NY), 1977.

Consequently I Rejoice (poems), Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1977.

After the Ark (children's poems), Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1978.

Winter Wind (poems), Janus Press (Newark, VT), 1979.

A Dream of Spring (poems), Celandine, 1980.

Selected Poems, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1980.

Moments of Grace (poems), Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1980.

Italian Light and Other Poems, illustrated by Gerald Woods, Snake River Press (Eastbourne, Sussex, England), 1981.

(Editor) The Batsford Book of Religious Verse, Batsford (London, England), 1981.

Celebrations and Elegies (poems), Carcanet New Press (Manchester, England), 1982. (Editor) In Praise of Our Lady, Batsford (London, England), 1982.

Extending the Territory (poems), Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1985.

(With others) Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary WomenPoets, Bloodaxe Books (Highgreen, England), 1985.

In Shakespeare's Company: Poems, Celandine (Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, England), 1985.

(With others) Poets in Hand: A Puffin Quintet, Penguin (New York, NY), 1985.

Collected Poems, 1953-1985, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1986.

Tributes (poems), Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1989.

Times and Seasons (poems), Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1993.

Familiar Spirits (poems), Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1995.

(Compiler) A Poet's Choice, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1996.

In the Meantime, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1996.

A Spell of Words: Selected Poems for Children, Macmillan (London, England), 1997.

Praises, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1998.

Timely Issues, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 2001.

Contributor of poems and articles to periodicals, including Agenda, London Magazine, Poetry Review, New Statesman, New Yorker, Scotsman, Spectator, Vogue, and Encounter.

Jennings's manuscripts are in the collections of the Oxford City Library and the University of Washington, Seattle, and Georgetown University Library, Washington, DC.

SIDELIGHTS: Poet Elizabeth Jennings established her literary reputation during the 1950s as part of The Movement, a group of "angry young men" including such writers as Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, and Philip Larkin, who used literature as a means of social protest. Jennings "brought the 'sensitive' dimension to the no-nonsense Movement," Alan Brownjohn wrote in the New Statesman. "Her work was . . . memorable in its quiet, unstrained way." Since then, Brownjohn noted, Jennings "impressively increased the scope and richness, and the technical variety and command, of her writing."

Jennings published poems in the Spectator, Poetry Review, and the New Statesman before Oscar Mellor, editor of the Fantasy Press Poetry Series, accepted her first book-length collection. Critical reception for the volume was very positive; it won the Arts Council Prize for a First Book of Poems. Jennings explained in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS), "The poems I was writing at this time still showed some influence of W. H. Auden and Robert Graves but there was a clarity, a kind of lyrical innocence which I still find valid today. I never caught Auden's own voice, luckily, but I learned from him something that has proved invaluable to me ever since, even when I have not been able by any means always to follow his example; it is to try to find the precise but unexpected adjective." Her second book, A Way of Looking, received mixed reviews, but more important to the poet was the fact that she subsequently won the Somerset Maugham Award for it in 1956. The award requires the winner to spend three months in a foreign country to observe the customs of people in another culture. Jennings chose to go to Italy. "I am quite sure that I owe the happiest and most worthwhile time of my life to this award and I shall always be grateful to Somerset Maugham for his generosity," she wrote in her autobiographical essay.

In 1966, Jennings published The Mind Has Mountains, a collection of poems written during her recovery from a mental breakdown. Her book's title is derived from a piece by the British poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. In Poetry Review, Leonard Clark mentioned that he found this work to be "unusual and disturbing. . . . and painful to read" because the author did not dwell in self-pity, but rather accepted her fate with an attitude of resignation. He felt, however, that these poems probably constitute "a state in [her] development."

Jennings's Collected Poems appeared a year after The Mind Has Mountains. "Her best poems are . . . exploratory of relationships," wrote Margaret Byers in British Poetry since 1960: A Critical Survey. Byers noted that in some of the later poems, Jennings is "rediscovering meaning in apparently overused words, finding a linguistic spareness and clarity which render the poems direct and to the heart." Terry Eagleton of Strand Magazine praised the poet for her "serious, uncompromising honesty."

Jennings increasingly turned to religious themes in her verse; her "best and natural state is contemplation, and the poems tend to be about the debits and credits of the contemplative attitude," P. N. Furbank pointed out in a Listener review of Recoveries. "Jennings's God is attractive because one senses that He is the sort of humanist god who reads His horoscope," remarked Will Eaves in a Times Literary Supplement review of Times and Seasons. In a review of Moments of Grace for the Listener, Dick Davis found that Jennings's title refers to the "intimations of a peace glimpsed beyond the fret and frustration of daily existence." "The poet herself," Davis added, "seems suspended" between the natural and spiritual worlds.

Andrew Motion of the New Statesman observed that "although Jennings has always produced excellently crafted poems, she has also tended to reduce their lyric force by including ruminatively philosophical material," while a Books and Bookmen reviewer of Selected Poems praised Jennings's attempt to "balance the mental and emotional demands of the priest and poet." And in the Spectator, Emma Fisher asserted that Jennings is "looking earnestly" for moments of grace, "carefully examining pieces of life as if waiting for them to break open in revelations." In addition to the vein of religious feeling that is clearly evident in much of her work, Jennings often wrote about personal relationships and family dynamics, such as in her collection Familiar Spirits.

Some of Jennings's poetry was published in the 1985 anthology titled Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. The volume includes a variety of her work such as "A Chorus," "A Letter to Peter Levi," "Star Midnight," and "Instinct for Seasons." In an English Review article, Gerry Fenge noted that "a key to much of Jennings's work . . . [is] vulnerability, which can at times (but only at times) be overcome by a sort of metaphysical exuberance." He remarked that Jennings's contributions move between "fragility [and] something like a juggler's jauntiness." Yet, as the critic noted, this is not unusual, for "journeys of the self are never straightforward."

Jennings's next book, Extending the Territory, is a work that contains many poems referring to her childhood. "She is one of the few living poets one could not do without," said Peter Levi in his Spectator review which was cited on the Carcanet Press Web site. Levi commended Jennings's "disarming authenticity and modesty and a certain sense of inward fire." He felt that he had discovered her work anew through Extending the Territory, even though he had been a devoted reader of her work for thirty years. Levi remarked: "She conveys a sense of something hidden but powerfully alive in her; she may be the last poet of what used to be called the soul."

Timely Issues, published in 2001 prior to Jennings's death, contains "images of illness, old age, hospitalization and compassion for the aged," according to M. C. Caseley's article in Stride Magazine online. Caseley noted the Christian beliefs that underlie much of Jennings's language and the archetypal images from which she borrows. The critic concluded: "This collection . . . finds Jennings exploring themes evident throughout much of her work, but her growing awareness of death and her own calm gaze at mortality make this . . . [an] affecting collection."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 5, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 14, 1980.

Contemporary Poets, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 27: Poets ofGreat Britain and Ireland, 1945-1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Gramang, Gerlinde, Elizabeth Jennings: An Appraisal of Her Life As a Poet, Her Approach to Her Work, and a Selection of the Major Themes of Her Poetry, Edwin Mellen Press (Lewiston, NY), 1995.

Schmidt, Michael, and Grevel Lindop, editors, BritishPoetry since 1960, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1972.

PERIODICALS

Books and Bookmen, December, 1972; February, 1980.

Books for Keeps, July, 1998, review of A Spell ofWords, p. 7.

English Review, September, 2000, Gerry Fenge, review of Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets, p. 26.

Listener, July 23, 1964; January 31, 1980.

New Statesman, October 13, 1967; May 30, 1975; November 2, 1979.

Poetry, March, 1977.

Poetry Review, spring, 1967, Leonard Clark, review of The Mind Has Mountains, p. 52.

Spectator, December 1, 1979; October 19, 1995, Peter Levi, review of Extending the Territory.

Strand Magazine, number 3, 1968, Terry Eagleton, review of Collected Poems, p. 69.

TES Primary, September 24, 1999, review of A Spell of Words, p. 49.

Times (London, England), January 16, 1986; February 11, 1989.

Times Educational Supplement, January 22, 1999, review of Praises, p. 13.

Times Literary Supplement, December 30, 1977; February 1, 1980; July 16, 1982; May 30, 1986; November 28, 1986; May 5, 1989; January 15, 1993, p. 23; May 5, 1995, p. 29.