Flat Stevie Smith

Critics of Stevie Smith’s work often lean on the word “flat.” Usually, term is meant to evoke “simplicity” and lack ornamentation, her refusal lift into “poetic resonance,” or unreadable tone. This essay attends more closely flatness in work, exploring ways Smith finds fascinating proposing that language “flat,” all its senses, offers an illuminating way grappling with difficulty puzzling unsettling prose poetry. It unpacks idea “flat”—a claims implicitly no unpacking remains be done—foregrounding diversity flatness’s associated emotions, as well it compelling. Drawing out breadth aesthetic interpretative connotations holds for her, argues, provides a coherent reading work. Beginning examination how “feeling flat” involves, Smith, diverse complex set moves outlining flat landscapes offer mode lingering habitation derives interest precisely from absence anything evidently interesting. In process, critical which approach other twentieth-century writers, such D. H. Lawrence, whose has remained elusive because insistence made meaning abundantly available—that nothing hide.