Elizabeth Jennings: a Catholic poet for our times

A talk given on Saturday, 3rd February 2024, to a meeting of Deo Gratias, a circle of Catholic young adults interested in expressions of the Christian faith in culture.  We meet on alternate Saturdays at the Rosary Shrine, Haverstock Hill, London.  After the discussion we visit the church for a time of Adoration, then repair to the pub.

Elizabeth Jennings in the 1940s. 
Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/image_viewer5039.html?img=portrait_7&gal=portraits 

We all know the cliché about studying poetry at school.  You spend all your time learning ‘the classics’ by heart — or ‘by rote’ as some more pejoratively call it — a compulsory exercise in memory which  drains all the life out of poetry, so that, by the age of sixteen, you are effectively inoculated against taking any joy whatsoever in it ever again.  That is the cliché — but I think for many in our generation the experience was something like the opposite extreme.  It was as if our GCSE English Literature examiners had fled in terror from daffodils and nightingales, and agreed that their chief priority in selecting poems for the syllabus was that they could never be learned by heart, even if anybody wanted to.

Accordingly, the examiners favoured free-verse poems on gritty, contemporary themes in a punchy, combative style: what a friend of mine calls ‘switchblades and asphalt’ poetry.  For example:

Today I am going to kill something.  Anything. 

I have had enough of being ignored and today 

I am going to play God.  It is an ordinary day, 

a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets. 

   — Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Education for Leisure’ 

Or the one about stealing a snowman for no reason, and kicking it to pieces:  

Part of the thrill was knowing 

that children would cry in the morning.  Life’s tough.  

   […] 

Then I was standing 

alone among lumps of snow, sick of the world. 

Boredom.  Mostly I’m so bored I could eat myself. 

   — Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Stealing’ 

The idea, of course, was to try to make a point: that poetry could be ‘relevant’ (that crucial word) to the young people of early twenty-first-century Britain — that it could be as tough and unsentimental and ‘real’, so to speak, as an inner-city housing-estate.  But the poems never transcended the hard realities they were portraying.  There was no real meditation on the suffering or boredom of those lives; no engagement of heart and mind together; no introduction to that interplay of beauty and truth — the balance between form and sense — the marriage of music and meaning, that we recognise in the best and most valuable poetry. 

So I finished my GCSEs aged sixteen rather grumpy with English Literature examiners in general.  How different, then, to open a new anthology at the start of my A-level course and encounter a passage like this: 

                     […] Man’s a believer 

Until corrupted.  This huge trusted power 

Is spirit.  He moves in the muscle of the world, 

In continual creation.  He burns the tides, he shines 

From the matchless skies.  He is the day’s surrender. 

                    […]

This spirit, this power, this holder together of space  

Is about, is aware, is working in your breathing.  

But most he is the need that shows in hunger  

And in the tears shed in the lonely fastness.  

And in sorrow after anger. 

         — ‘A Chorus’ (Moments of Grace, 1979; Collected Poems, p. 440.) 

Notice how, even though the poem alludes to hardship and sorrow — to ‘cities with their factory darkness’, say, or by the way in which the lines ‘hopes fulfilled or forgotten’ and ‘promises kept’ (as opposed to just ‘hopes and promises’) acknowledge, implicitly, the possibility of hopes being dashed, or promises broken – the poem itself transcends these sorrows and hardships, and helps us to see them in the perspective of a greater reality, rather than just languishing in them. 

This was my introduction to Elizabeth Jennings, and it is still one of my favourite poems. I have school examiners to thank for it! One of the many things I love about it is the wonderfully controlled diminuendo that extends over its course.  It doesn’t go where you initially expect.  It begins in a blaze of glory, with these dazzling panoramic views of Creation, but gradually softens, growing steadily more meditative and introspective.  And the last line, ‘And in sorrow after anger’, even feels like a whispered afterthought — almost a confession.  It is a poem that seems to travel from the pulpit to the pew, from the choir-loft to the confessional. In this it is rather like the Te Deum (which begins ‘We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord; All the earth doth worship thee, the Father everlasting’, but whose last line is the far more intimate ‘O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded’.)   

So who is, as she has been called, ‘England’s best Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins’?  Who is Elizabeth Jennings? 

Elizabeth Jennings as a child
Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/image_viewerc424.html?img=portrait_5&gal=portraits

Elizabeth Jennings was born in Boston in Lincolnshire, in dead-level Fen country, in 1926, and spent an idyllic early childhood there. ‘Six years of a flat land,’ she was to remember, ‘The sea […] Was more luminous even / Than the blazing tulips in formidable ranks’ – but in 1931 her father was appointed County Medical Officer for Oxfordshire, so to Oxford she, with her parents and older sister Aileen, accordingly moved. The city was to be her home for the rest of her life.  In suburban North Oxford the Jennings family were neighbours and fellow parishioners of the Tolkiens, and Priscilla, the Professor’s daughter, was to become a lifelong friend.  Jennings’ love of poetry began at school – they read G. K. Chesterton’s Lepanto (‘Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard […] Don John of Austria / Is riding to the sea […]’).  ‘That was one of the key experiences of my life.  It hit me’, she recalled years later. 

In 1944 she went up to St. Anne’s College, Oxford, to study English Literature.  Here she fell in with several up-and-coming writers and novelists: Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn.  She was popular and apparently had many admirers.  Kingsley Amis wrote that ‘she seemed on her bicycle and in her T-shirt very advanced for those days’, though she herself remembered being ‘agonisingly shy’.   It was at this time that she found early success in poetry and was published for the first time.   

Here is the beginning of an early poem, ‘Warning’: 

Child do not tell your images, we kill them 

With argument and I would wish you deaf 

Rather than hear the mad cries of our logic 

Aiming at beauty, wounding it with grief. 

Be silent now and do not tell your magic. 

     – from an early poem, ‘Warning’ (Collected Poems, p. 6) 

She was briefly engaged to be married to a fellow student, but this was broken off.  After graduating she ‘did eight years’ hard labour’, as she put it, in Oxford City Library, before joining the publishers Chatto and Windus as a reader.  All the time she was writing poetry.  Her first full-length collection, ‘Growing Points’, came out 1955.  In 1957 she won the Somerset Maugham Award, the prize being three months in a foreign city of the winner’s choosing.  Jennings chose Rome, and her time there was one of the happiest periods of her life.  Her memories of Rome return time and time again in her poetry. 

However, the 1960s were more difficult, bringing with them a several recurring periods of mental illness.  It is not altogether clear what brought this on: possibly overwork, possibly heartbreak, but either way, she suffered a serious mental breakdown and spent three years in and out of hospital.  Her distress was severe enough that she made several suicide attempts, and she also suffered from alcoholism.  Yet she never stopped writing poetry, even if many were later to be suppressed. 

The story of Jennings’ later life is, looked at in one way – and perhaps the wrong way – a sad one.  She never attained the literary stardom of Larkin and Amis.  Nor did she ever marry or have children, and although she claimed not to regret it, I am not entirely convinced of this. She said, for example, ‘I wouldn’t have been a good proposition for marriage.  I jump out of bed to write poems.  I don’t like housework.  I think I like being independent.  I am a romantic and I don’t think romance lasts.  I can’t bear things ending.’  There’s a tinge of unwilling resignation about the last two remarks, I think.  Still, perhaps she knew her own mind. In any case, having spent a number of years sharing quarters with a Czech refugee, in later years she lived alone in Oxford and gained a reputation more as an eccentric than as a poet.  She used to take her papers in plastic carrier bags to a café, where she would sit and write and observe. Very few people knew who she really was.  She collected trinkets, dolls’ houses and china ornaments, and attracted curiosity by never dressing up for formal occasions, even to receive the CBE in 1993 – her appearance in a duffel-coat resulted in the press rather cruelly calling her ‘bag-lady of the sonnets’.  But again, all the time she was writing poetry, right up until her death in 2001 at the age of seventy-five.

I should say a little about her faith.  Unlike many of our prominent Catholic poets like St. John Henry Newman, Chesterton and Hopkins, Jennings was a cradle Catholic, rather than a convert.  As a small child she and her sister used to play Mass, with a toy oven for a tabernacle, and a wooden train as a thurible.  As she grew up, though, she became less happy.  She found she had questions to which nobody would give her adequate answers.  There was also one particularly horrible incident in Confession where a priest seems to have told her, ‘All you think about is your ugly little self’ and, unbelievably, even though he had given her absolution, told her not to receive Communion with the other children on Sunday.  This, she said, ‘did a great deal of damage’, though not to the extent that she lost her faith.  In an unpublished poem, ‘Abuse of a Sacrament’, she wrote, ‘I have known priests who tore the soul apart […]  O yes, I’ve known the dreadful penance move / All hope away.  For this Christ knew the place / Of agony.’ 

The damage was only really repaired years later in Rome, where, she said, ‘I really found happiness’.  She climbed the Holy Steps on her knees, even though a priest told her they were not authentic. ‘They have been hallowed by centuries of penitence’, she said. Her happiness is clearly mainly because, perhaps for the first time since childhood, she had recognised her faith as a source more of joy than of torment.  And I think this is how it remained, giving her strength in the years of illness and suffering that followed. 

All her life, as far as I know, she was a faithful and regular Mass-goer.  In fact, it is nice that we are discussing her at St. Dominic’s Priory, as she was friends with many Dominican religious, dedicated poems to many of them, and, certainly late in her life, regularly attended Mass at Blackfriars in Oxford.  (Last October I was chatting to a lady here at St. Dominic’s who was from Oxford and had been a parishioner at Blackfriars for long enough to remember Jennings as a small figure huddled in the front pew – though only found out after her death who she was). 

Assessment 

It is easy to underestimate Elizabeth Jennings.  She tends to be thought not to have lived up to the potential of her poetic career.  The American poet Dana Gioia acknowledges that she ‘had the peculiar fate of being in the right place at the right time in the wrong way’, in that she had the brilliant good fortune to coincide with the Oxford literary scene at a time when there was a reaction in poetry against the obscurity and deliberate ‘difficulty’ of Modernism, and a return to a more unadorned style (in something called ‘The Movement’, an unhelpfully vague name) — but, ultimately, her fellow poets at Oxford were cut from a different cloth to her.  As well as being unornamented, the Movement poetry was deliberately unsentimental (even anti-sentimental), not just unpretentious but often curmudgeonly, pessimistic and ironic.  Elizabeth Jennings’ style is more romantic, closer to nineteenth-century poets like Christina Rosetti and Emily Dickinson (though by ‘romantic’ I don’t mean ‘sentimental’).  She was the only woman, and the only Catholic, associated with that movement.  She also committed the cardinal literary sin of being too prolific – but more on that in a moment. 

I actually think that some of the things that have led people to overlook her are precisely what make her worth reading and befriending today, and which make her in many ways a poet for our times. 

Firstly, there is the directness and simplicity of her poetic voice.  In contrast to many of her contemporaries, there is no irony in Jennings’ verse, no sarcasm, and though there can be anger or regret there is seldom outright bitterness.  It is honest verse, sometimes painfully honest, but this honesty brings a clarity, a trustworthiness, which is refreshing in an era of switchblades and asphalt.  Jennings takes ordinary, personal themes — friendship, childhood, bereavement — and very simply tells the truth about them.  Here is the beginning of a well-known poem of hers, ‘Friendship’: 

Such love I cannot analyse; 

It does not rest in lips or eyes, 

Neither in kisses nor caress. 

Partly, I know, it’s gentleness 

And understanding in one word 

Or in brief letters. […]

        – from ‘Friendship’ (Relationships, 1972) 

There is also a great humility to her.  It appears, for instance, in another favourite of mine, a poem called ‘Losing and Finding’ about a six-year-old child who had come to her house to look for her after getting lost and whom she had taken to a playground while waiting for the parents to turn up (which seems to have taken an entire afternoon!  The Seventies were different times).  It ends, 

And it was you who rescued me, you know. 

Among the swings, the meadow and the river, 

You took me out of time, rubbed off on me 

What it feels like to care without restriction, 

To trust and never think of a betrayal. 

        – ‘Losing and Finding’ (Growing Points, 1975; Collected Poems, p. 340) 

A similar example of her humility and self-effacement is a poem she wrote about a visit to a school to meet some A-level students who were studying her work: the poem is all about them and their hopes and worries, not her; they clearly made as strong an impression on her as she might have expected to on them. 

Yet this simplicity and humility is not sentimentalism or naivety.  Her observations, whether interior or exterior, are always acute and perspicacious.  She will say what needs to be said, will confront and dwell on evil if necessary – though always with the searching light of faith.  

For example, here is a poem from a late collection (Times and Seasons, 1992) about the changed, post-Sixties attitudes to romantic love.  Note that it is a sonnet, a form with a long association with love-poetry: 

You take the whole of love.  We lived by touch

And doubt and by the purposes of chance

And yet I think our slow ways carried much

That you have missed — the guess, the wish, the glance. 

        – ‘The Way They Live Now’ (Times and Seasons, 1992; Collected Poems, p. 669) 

I find it very interesting that Jennings was actually asked to read out this poem on Radio 4 when she was interviewed on Desert Island Discs in 1993.  The presenter Sue Lawley called it ‘splendid’. I am not sure that this would happen on today’s BBC.   

So you see the very Christian combination of truth and love that permeates Jennings’ verse.  I think of her as a sort of ‘poetry Auntie’, someone with whom I could happily have spent an evening chatting, but who would certainly have spoken her mind frankly if she needed to. 

And of course Jennings’ faith illuminates the whole of her verse, as well as her life and art.   She was unashamed in taking sacred themes, in writing about feasts and seasons, the sacraments, the saints, the city of Rome.  She returned again and again to Catholic subjects.  There are three poems on Lazarus, for instance; she wrote sequences on the Seven Deadly Sins, the Easter Triduum, and the different kinds of love.  ‘My Roman Catholic religion and my poems are the most important things in my life,’ she said. 

Her faith informed not only her art but her whole attitude to her art, her whole understanding of poetry itself.  I mentioned her prolific output.  From a literary point of view, over-production is often looked down upon, as it suggests a lack of self-criticism, even a lack of self-discipline.  Writing less is taken to imply higher quality.  And look how thick her Collected Poems are!  But reading through these poems – and there are a lot of them – I came to realise that this is not just a literary testament, but a spiritual one.  Not all of her verses are great poems, but literary greatness is not primarily what she was striving for.  

The editor of her Collected Poems, Emma Mason, has pointed out that Jennings recognises poetry as a kind of incarnation.  Ours is, after all, a religion of the Word — Jesus Christ is the Word as well as the Son of God — and so His incarnation elevates not only our human flesh but our human language.  So, in reading these poems, we come to realise that many of them are doing something else at the same time.  As well as poems they are thoughts, or gestures, or feelings that have been incarnated, that have ‘taken flesh’ in the form of printed type or speech.  They are personal reminiscences, memories, jottings, postcards, tributes, farewells, even apologies, meditations — and in one way or another they are almost always prayers.  For her, poetry is always a kind of prayer, and perhaps any prayer is also a kind of poem.  For those of us who love poetry (and who see the Mass, for instance, as a kind of poem) this is a pleasing blurring of boundaries.

Certainly this is how I think much of her work is best understood: as prayer-poems, so to speak.  She sheepishly acknowledged that she wrote fast and revised little – sheepishly but unrepentantly, because for her, writing too much was only like praying too much — and we would hardly try to improve the quality of our prayer by praying less.  So really, this book is a spiritual journal, a legacy of a life of prayer as much as of poetry – which is why she can say, with complete humility, ‘It is, I think, in my own poetry / I meet my God.  He’s a familiar there.’  (from ‘A Way to a Creed’, A Dream of Spring, 1980). 

Here is another of my favourite poems of hers, ‘At a Mass’, in which she meditates on the interplay between art and faith – on how, true as it is that beauty can and should lead us to God, our appreciation of beauty can get in the way, even in church.  To those of us who are deeply sensitive to the beauty of the Mass, it offers food for thought: 

        […] 

I struggle now with my own ideas of love  

And wonder if art and religion mean dividing.  

Each has his way and mine perhaps is to

Suffer the critical sense that cannot rest.  

If the air is cool, the colours right, the spoken  

Words dramatic enough, then I am pleased.  

But why must I ask a sense of style in the broken  

Bread and bring God down to my limited view?  […] 

– ‘At a Mass’ (Song for a Birth or Death, 1961).  Collected Poems p. 96. 

Another interesting poem to read in this light is To a Friend with a Religious Vocation, which reveals her own sense of a poetic vocation, but also that it takes second place to a formal religious vocation – rightly, as she acknowledges, but not without pain: 

Thinking of your vocation, I am filled

With thoughts of my own lack of one. I see 

Within myself no wish to breed or build 

Or take the three vows ringed by poverty. 

And yet I have a sense,  

Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry, 

Of purpose. 

    […] 

You know what you must do, 

So that mere breathing is a way to bless. 

Dark nights, perhaps, but no grey days for you. 

— from ‘To a Friend with a Religious Vocation’ (Song for a Birth or Death, 1961; Collected Poems p. 105). 

(‘Breed or build’ is a quotation from Hopkins’ poem about writer’s block, frustrated vocations and a sense of purposelessness: ‘birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, /  Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.’) 

So: simplicity, truth-telling, and faith: these are the main gifts that I think Jennings gives us. 

Conclusion 

When asked how she would like to be remembered, Jennings said simply, ‘As someone who wrote good poems’. I think we might add, ‘someone who wrote good prayers’.  Perhaps this is why it is such a surprise to me, though certainly a welcome one, that she is still on A-level syllabuses. She is, I think, a poet for our times: she only died in 2001, so was more than familiar with the encroachment of secularism and the hidden sorrows of modern life – and certainly with the challenges of sticking to one’s faith even in a cultural headwind, or at professional cost.  I feel that if she were here now she would understand us, sympathise with us – and then go home and write a poem about us. 

In an age of switchblades and asphalt, and of sarcasm and irony, and of joylessness and hopelessness, her poetic voice is like a simple candle which, like the Christian faith itself, is easily dismissed by the world, but unobtrusively sheds consoling and truthgul light for us.  In this way, she can help us to recover simpler, straightforward, unironic speech, and simpler, more straightforward faith. 

To finish, here is one last poem: a late one (from 1998), and I think a very beautiful one, called ‘A Full Moon’. 

            […]     But look again 

That Host-like moon shines where 

All can see him.  Christ took on all pain 

Beyond time’s arbiter. 

            […]

That moon in silence can 

Elevate us till we long to know 

The Trinity’s whole plan. 

Nature was fashioned for this purpose.  See 

A moon reminds us of God’s ministry. 

– ‘A Full Moon’ (Praises, 1998; Collected Poems, p. 760) 

Elizabeth Jennings, c. 1990
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Further reading & listening: 

Elizabeth Jennings, Collected Poems, ed. Emma Mason (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012).  ISBN 9781847770684.   

Elizabeth Jennings, New Selected Poems, ed. Rebecca Watts (Manchester: Carcanet, 2019).  ISBN 9781784108663.   

Hear Jennings reading her own poems on the Poetry Archive website: https://poetryarchive.org/poet/elizabeth-jennings/.

Jennings’ interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, 8th January 1993: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0093x99 . 

Dana Gioia, ‘Clarify Me, Please, God of the Galaxies: In Praise of the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings’, in First Things (May 2018).  Available online at:  https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/05/clarify-me-please-god-of-the-galaxies. 

The Elizabeth Jennings Project at De Montfort University, web bibliography and resource.  https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/home.html

Excerpts from poems are reproduced under the ‘fair dealing’ copyright exception for quotation.  Images are reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from the Elizabeth Jennings Project at De Montfort University (https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk), in accordance with their copyright notice.