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Although Stevie Smith repeatedly acknowledges that humans cannot picture the minds of nonhuman animals, she also repeatedly asserts that contemporary petkeeping practices have troubling psychological effects. Examining how she negotiates these beliefs—and her fascination with animals—offers another way of considering her famously shifty stance toward meaning. That shiftiness is made visible in guarded depictions of several domestic animals, especially in “The Galloping Cat,” a late poem that speaks from a cat’s perspective; it bridges Smith’s strong convictions and equally strong uncertainty. Smith sees people as relentlessly constructing inner lives for animals; through pets, she articulates a view of the human based in constant misreading. At the same time, however, she points out that our attempts to imagine these other subjectivities may have damaging consequences for animals.

The poet Stevie Smith wrote frequently about dogs, cats, and other creatures. Yet she has been virtually ignored within the field of literary animal studies. This oversight may be due to Smith’s frivolous treatment of animals; however, the aesthetics of frivolity offer a valuable addition to animal studies’usual serious affective orientation. The cuteness, irreverence, and absurdity of Smith’s pet poems are more than just markers of her trademark eccentric style. They are also an ethos. Against the forces of seriousness and utility, which drive the economies of cultural capital and actual capital, her animal poems assert the right of frivolous things—including animals and poems—to exist. Attending to Smith thus has payoffs not just for animal studies, but also for modernist poetics and affect studies, which are increasingly interested in the question of how it feels to be non-productive in an instrumentalist society.

Stevie Smith, one of the most productive of twentieth-century poets, is too often remembered simply as the coiner of the four-word punch line of a single short poem. This paper argues that her claim to be seen as a great writer depends on the major themes which—in addition to “death by water”—she shares with T.S. Eliot: Anglicanism and the modern reworking of classical literature, with a strong, and in her case sometimes autobiographical, emphasis on female protagonists. Where the female figures in Eliot’s The Waste Land are seen as parodic and diminished contemporary versions of their classical originals, Smith enters and reimagines her classical sources, testing the strength of the narrative material which binds Phèdre, Antigone, Persephone and Helen of Troy to their fates. In contrast to Eliot’s adult conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, Smith became a convert to agnosticism, engaging in a passionate poetic argument with the faith of her childhood, which led her to challenge Eliot himself. She brings both of these themes together in the most personal of her poems, which celebrate, and ultimately invoke, Thanatos, “the only god/Who comes as a servant”, and who puts a merciful end to all stories by “scattering... the human pattern altogether”.

This article responds to philosophers and literary critics who espouse concepts about an endemic postsecularity in western nations that encroach across the globe. Postsecularity accounts for the resurgence of a religious consciousness in the face of challenges to secularity in the forms of accommodating minority religions; the yearning for spiritual expression as an antidote to capitalist materialism; and posthuman concerns about the engineering of biological human identities, artificial intelligence, and anthropogenic climate crises. Poetry, with its non-verbal cues, can both animate and also reach beyond the purely rational discourses of philosophy. Accordingly, poems by T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith, and Carol Ann Duffy span a century of thought and literary evocations of the interstices and crossovers of theocentric belief and unbelief. They illuminate the postsecular elements of partial faith, spiritual plurality, and resacralization. These elements disrupt binary polarizations of atheism and faith.

John Stuart Mill’s liberal vision included a notion of “civil advancement” whereby the free expression of a diversity of opinion would result not only in an initial collision of difference but also in an eventual consolidation as truth. The work of this article is to explore the ways and extents in which such liberalism can translate into a cosmopolitan anthropology. Is toleration of difference the appropriate anthropological ethic, or can one hypothesize a liberal “magnanimous” overcoming of difference? In a wide-ranging discussion, the voice of Mill is juxtaposed against those of C. P. Snow, Ernest Gellner, Stevie Smith, and Karl Popper. Much commentary would suggest that liberalism is passé. A political context dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions, and resurgent ethnicities spells the collapse, it is told, of any Enlightenment project of liberal-humanist universalism. “Cultures are not options.” Notwithstanding, the argument is made here that as “opinion” grades into “knowledge,” so “culture” grades into “civilization” and local community (polis) into global society (cosmos). Difference may become a step along the way to a recognition of universal human truth.

Over the years, critics have made similar observations to Anthony Burgess' Russian-based coinages used in \"A Clockwork Orange;\" however, no one has speculated about the origin of \"Bog,\" Burgess' word for God. Craik expounds on his suggestion that \"Bog\" might have been derived from Stevie Smith's poem \"Our Bog is Dood.\"

\"1 What makes her vexing for our curricula (to which courses does she properly belong?) has made her fascinating for Julie Sims Steward and Kristin Bluemel, who have fruitfully focused on the tensions, symmetries, and contradictions between her drawings and her poems; for James Najarian, Sheryl Stevenson, and William May, who have been sensitive readers of Smith's polyvocal intertextual innovations; and for Catherine Civello and Laura Severin, who have explored Smith's fiction and poems with a view to her engagement with popular culture and her representation of childhood as a means of subverting conventional gender concepts (particularly those concerned with domestic femininity). At the outset of his essay he establishes that, except in pathological cases, men transfer their infantile narcissism onto a sexually overvalued love-object, experiencing love primarily as the \" impoverishment of the ego as regards libido in favor of the love object\" (88); this is the condition of anaclitic desire, a term meaning \"leaning-on,\" to indicate that the mature male libido will choose a love-object patterned on the person who originally met his most primal needs (i.e., nursing).

Sylvia Townsend Warner's middle aged renegade Lolly Willowes, for example, moves from the centre in London to a rural periphery in Great Mop only to find herself moving even further into the indifferent, non-social company of shrubs and ditches while the novel itself playfully and in total disregard of the \"rules\" hovers between the realistic and the fantastic, the everyday and the occult, in an ironic mode which ultimately cannot be rescued onto firm non-ironic ground by a process of reversal.