Fifty years after the poet’s death, works that were never meant to console are newly resonant
Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Stevie Smith. She was 68, and had been suffering from a brain tumour. At the end, her head wrapped in a startling pink turban, she was reported to have amazed visitors by performing her final poem Come Death from her hospital bed.
I’ve been keen on Smith ever since I was a teenager, a passion that at one point was so fierce that I was unaccountably moved to give a paper on her at an academic conference. (While other people’s side hustles are intended to make them extra cash, apparently mine must all involve unpaid work of the most futile kind.)
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