True clarity reaches the heights

Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings was born on July 20, 1926, died on October 2001,was an English poet noted for her clarity of style and simplicity of literary approach. Her Roman Catholicism coloured much of her work.

Jennings was born in Lincolnshire, but her family moved to Florida when she was six; There she later attended St.Anne's college. After graduation, she became a librarian.

She is not generally regarded as an innovator. Her work displays a simplicity of metre and rhyme shared with Phlip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn, all members of English poets known as The Movement.

She always made it clear that, whilst her life, which included a spell of severe mental illness, contributed to the themes contained within her work, she did not write explicitly autobiographical poetry.

Only one thing must be cast out," wrote the poet Elizabeth Jennings, who has died aged 75, "and that is the vague. Only true clarity reaches to the heights and the depths of human, and more than human, understanding." The words are from her study of 20th-century authors, Seven Men Of Vision (1976), which included reflections on Yeats, DH Lawrence, Pasternak and St-Exupéry; but they sum up perfectly the aspirations and achievements of her own poetry.

Elizabeth's father, Henry Cecil Jennings, was chief medical officer for her birthplace of Boston, Lincolnshire, whose environs - "a flat land of sugarbeet and tulips" - were to be vividly recreated in some of her later poems. When she was six, the family moved to Oxford, where she attended Oxford high school and discovered poetry. Delighted, at first, by the rhythms of Chesterton's Battle Of Lepanto, she soon moved on to Keats and Coleridge, and began to write her own poems.

When she was 13, the second world war broke out; at about the same time, she began to find religion - she was born a Catholic - "a real and important part of my life, and because it was important, it tended to give me a lot of worries". Spiritual concerns and a sense of vulnerability, often issuing in a profound sensitivity to the suffering of others, would become important elements in her output.

After reading English at St Anne's College, Oxford, Jennings became a librarian at Oxford city library. Poetry was, by now, her overriding interest, and her first collection, Poems (1953), published by the Fantasy Press, drew the attention of Robert Conquest, who included her work with that of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, John Wain and others in his 1956 New Lines anthology, launching what became known as "The Movement".

Jennings was the sole female contributor, and the short, first poem in her section of the book, Delay (which remained the opener of all her subsequent collected and selected volumes) had the unmistakable note of a classic.

From its opening scientific proposition, "The radiance of that star that leans on me/ Was shining years ago", to its sad and muted conclusion that "love arrived may find us somewhere else", the eight-line poem epitomized the path her work would take: the path of flawless traditional verse-technique, sharp imagery, logical thought and emotional sensitivity.

"The Movement", if it was one, faded from prominence as poets went their separate ways, but Jennings continued, with remarkable tenacity, to work in her own deceptively simple style, developing a uniquely personal voice.

She left librarianship to become a publisher's reader for Chatto and Windus from 1958 to 1960, and thereafter wrote regular poetry reviews for the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, poems were written steadily and prolifically - "I write fast and revise very little," she confessed - with a new volume appearing every two or three years, an oeuvre which amounted at last to nearly 30 books.

Jennings' work, though consistent in tone, was not repetitious. There was a steady growth in emotional intensity, and in her willingness to tackle uncomfortable subjects, and each volume contained at least a few poems of startling power, as in One Flesh (published in The Mind Has Mountains, 1966), where the sadly and lovingly described elderly couple "Lying apart now, each in a separate bed" are identified at last as the poet's parents, "Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold."

A breakdown in the early 1960s resulted in some ill-judged experimental poems, later suppressed, in jagged typographical forms, but also in the superb Sequence In Hospital, published in Recoveries (1964), which explores the experience of hospitalization with unsparing clarity: "What to say first? I learnt I was afraid/ Fear became absolute and I became/ Subject to it; it beckoned, I obeyed." Travel in Italy led to a lasting engagement with Italian culture and a translation of The Sonnets Of Michelangelo (1961), which is still the standard version and remains unsurpassed.

Becoming, almost without noticing it, one of Britain's most popular poets, Jennings was also, from the 1960s, an important mentor to generations of student poets, who would be invited for tea and sympathetic criticism at her modest north Oxford lodgings, whose every horizontal surface was crowded with a fantastic array of china knick-knacks, glass animals, doll's house furniture and musical boxes - the "collections" she gave as her hobby in Who's Who.

She never married, though there was an early engagement, and Oxford remained the centre of her world. But, within modest geographical limits, she lived a life rich in culture and friendship. She found poetry readings an ordeal, and avoided most literary gatherings. None the less, she was a much-loved part of the Oxford scene until the mid-90s. A familiar figure on the bus to Stratford-upon-Avon, she rarely missed a new production of Shakespeare; a connoisseur of ice-cream, she was a regular at the Häagen-Daz's ice-cream parlour. So avid was her film going that her local cinema, in Walton Street, was rumoured to have given her a free pass for life.

Her later work showed increased breadth and vigour. From the aptly named Extending The Territory (1985) onwards, she often wrote poems in flowing, free-verse lines, recollecting childhood and celebrating nature with a thoughtful nostalgia reminiscent of Rilke: "I watched as a child the slow/ Leaves turning and taking the sun, and the autumn bonfires,/ The whips of wind blowing a landscape away./ Always it was the half-seen, the just-heard which enthralled."

She received the WH Smith literary award in 1987 for her second Collected Poems (the first had appeared in 1967, and so ruthless was her self-criticism that the later volume was actually shorter), and, in 1992, the CBE. Despite a gradual decline in health, she continued to write with undiminished vigour and sharpness.

Delay by Elizabeth Jennings

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else

Absence by Elizabeth Jennings

I visited the place where we last met.
Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,
The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,
Singing an ecstasy I could not share,
Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these
Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear
Or any discord shake the level breeze.

It was because the place was just the same
That made your absence seem a savage force,
For under all the gentleness there came
An earthquake tremor: Fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name

Her last volume, Timely Issues, published earlier this year, characteristically contains not only tributes to Hopkins, Traherne and Robert Graves but a poem of shrewd advice "To Any Newish Poet".