About the Book
'The great unshackling of women's voices in poetry has one of its beginnings right here. These sad beautiful poems are full of rendings and breakings and burnings.'
So writes Eavan Boland in her introduction to her selection of poems of Charlotte Mew (1868-1928). Identifying in Mew the startling, powerful voice that first made possible a new kind of poetry, free of Victorian expectations of a 'poetess', Boland has selected the poems that have meant most to her as a reader and a writer. The dialogue between the two poets establishes Mew's place in the continuing dialogue of women's writing.
About the Author :
Charlotte Mew was born in London in 1869, the third child of an architect, and was educated at a girl's school in London.Her first published work was a short story in The Yellow Book in 1894.In May 1912 Mew was introduced to May Sinclair, a leading novelist who was active in the women's suffrage movement.Mew fell in love with her, but although Sinclair encouraged her writing; she did not reciprocate Mew's feelings and the relationship eventually broke up.The period from 1913 was one of the most productive periods for Mew's poetry, however, and she became an increasingly published and admired poet.Living with her mother and sister Anne, an artist, in difficult circumstances, Mew found freedom and inspiration on holidays in France and Belgium.In 1923 she was awarded a Civil List pension on the recommendation of John Masefield, Walter de la Mare and Thomas Hardy.A fear of hereditary mental illness had led Mew and her sister to vow not to marry:both her elder brother and another younger sister had been taken to mental hospitals.In 1927, still grieving from the death of her sister, Mew killed herself, possibly because she feared the onset of insanity. Born in Dublin in 1944, Eavan Boland studied in Ireland, London and New York. Her first book was published in 1967. She taught at Trinity College, University College Dublin, Bowdoin College in Maine, and at the University of Iowa. She was Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, California. A pioneering figure in Irish poetry, Boland's works include The Historians (2020), which won the Costa Poetry Award 2020 and was a 2020 Book of the Year in the TLS, Guardian, Sunday Independent and Irish Times, The Journey and other poems (1987), Night Feed (1982), The Lost Land (1998) and Code (2001). Her poems and essays appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Kenyon Review and American Poetry Review. She was a regular reviewer for the Irish Times. She divided her time between California and Dublin where she lived with her husband, the novelist Kevin Casey. Eavan died in Dublin on 27th April 2020.
Review :
Classic: Charlotte Mew, Selected Poems edited and with an introduction by Eavan Boland
"There is a sort of salt and spray about reading Mew for the first time," says Eavan Boland in her introduction. "Her poems are not like anything else." Boland should know. She is herself a profound poet, and a radical thinker about poetry. She keeps her copy of Mew's 1953 Collected Poems to hand, "always knowing that within its rosy, tattered dust jacket and sturdy covers burns and lives the music of dissidence".
Charlotte Mew did not fit in her own time. She was born in 1869, the daughter of a genteel professional family dogged by poverty, ill-health, and mental breakdown. Two of her siblings ended their lives in institutions. So, as Boland says, Mew's poetry is "cluttered" with cemeteries, asylums, sea roads, cheap rooms and broken dolls. Her subjects are eerie and unsettling. The desperate voice of the rejected lover in The Farmer's Bride is sad, but hints at sexual violence - "Oh! My God! The down,/ The soft young down of her, the brown,/ The brown of her - her eyes, her hair, her hair!" Lost love and a failure to be brave mark A quoi bon dire, Rooms and On the Road to the Sea. The lonely speaker in The Quiet House longs for death: "Some day I shall not think; I shall not be!"
But it is Mew's form that is strangest of all. Her poems break all the rules. In fact, they know no rules. She fragments images and rends her grammar. She makes lines that limp and then fly. Sometimes they are excessively, insistently long, or cut off abruptly. Her lines are spiky, obsessive, wilful. But then, so was she.
The issue of gender and sexuality is, as Boland says, not overtly discussed in the poems, but is "nevertheless the weather of many of them". Awkward, proud and fey, Mew's private life was as difficult as her public life as a poet. She drank Lysol one Saturday in 1928 and died horribly. But her poems - awkward, haunting and brave - are not easily forgotten.
By: Margaret Reynolds
