Life & Wisdom Quote by Stevie Smith

Stevie Smith lands the joke with the offhand timing of someone pretending not to care, which is exactly how you can tell she cares. “I don’t think Auden liked my poetry very much” is a small wound made deliberately smaller; the shrug is a shield. Then she twists the knife into a punchline: “he’s very Anglican.” It’s not theology as gossip so much as aesthetic class-coding. Anglican here reads as temperament: orderly, correct, institutionally blessed, suspicious of the unruly or too nakedly personal. Auden, with his formal intelligence and public stature, becomes shorthand for a gatekeeping sensibility; Smith, with her wry, sing-song morbidity and childlike surfaces, positions herself as the person who won’t be house-trained.

The line works because it converts critical rejection into a mismatch of atmospheres rather than talent. If Auden didn’t like her, it’s not because her poems fail; it’s because he belongs to a church of taste that can’t quite accommodate her oddball sincerity and refusal to behave. “Very Anglican” also smuggles in a whole British ecosystem: manners, class, the polite violence of understatement, and the way literary approval can feel like social approval with footnotes.

Smith’s subtext is sharper than the quip suggests: canon formation isn’t neutral, it’s pastoral. She makes the establishment sound like a parish, and herself like the heretic who insists on singing slightly out of tune. That’s not just funny; it’s a strategy for staying free.