The Poems of Katherine Mansfield

by Katherine Mansfield, Vincent O'Sullivan (Editor)

Though best known for her short stories, Katherine Mansfield was also an accomplished poet. The only edition of her poems, published in the 1920s, has long been out of print, and her poetry is known today only through a handful of anthology entries. This book presents a fresh selection of
Mansfield's verse, including all of her published poetry and a number of unpublished and uncollected pieces. O'Sullivan's introduction, which relates Mansfield's poetry to her prose and sets it within the larger literary context of her time, presents the poetry in a completely new light. He
demonstrates that she was innovative to a degree that has never before been recognized.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.

Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world.

Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work.

Mansfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. The stories are innovative in many other ways. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily.

Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, and the inevitability of these paradoxes. Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.

Reviews

[Julie]

5.0/10

The only reason I picked this up is that it was the first one to pop up on my screen when I signed into gutenberg.org looking for something else to read. This had just been released as one of their new transcriptions. I've never had any curiosity for Mansfield's poetry, and in the end I knew why.

These seem to me like the lines written by a rather simple adolescent girl -- simple, in the best sense of the word -- but still a bit pointless and uninspired.

Naive and harmless; definitely unsophisticated. Certainly no harm in that, but it still managed to evoke a contrived innocence which was rather puzzling, bordering on annoying.

The only exception to this rather flat offering was her poem to her brother, "To L.H.B. 1894-1915" ... but that might be only because I too have a "little brother" for whom I feel such tender affection.

It pains me to say I wouldn't look at these poems a second time.

[Abi Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

There were a few really lovely poems in this collection ("To L.H.B." stands out) but overall it felt cheesy, naive, and contrived. It would have been a two-star read, but I knocked it down to one for the blatant racism in the last "Child Verses" section. We hate to see it.
I don't understand people comparing her to Virginia Woolf at all. They're not even in the same league in my opinion. Maybe Mansfield's short stories are better? I'm not gonna read them though haha.

[Fin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A slightly hit and miss collection; a fair amount of the early poems are genuinely not very good - a bit cloying with some quite over-sentimental imagery. This is the first exposure I've had to Mansfield (after reading an Ali Smith story centred around her piqued my interest) and I'm not sure it was really the best - I will get to her short fiction soon - but nevertheless a lot of the poems here did have a certain beguiling, raw passion to them (almost bronte-esque at points?), particularly her middle and later work ("To God The Father", "The Awakening River")

Perhaps more excitingly than the collection itself (sorry Katherine ur still great) is the edition I read: I found this in the village mini-library, recently converted from an old telephone box, and it seemed the only interesting book in there (there were 3 separate copies of the Da Vinci Code lol). When I opened it later, I was surprised not only by the fact that this beautiful hardback was printed in 1940, but that it had a note dated from 1946 written on the first page from a Canadian Graham to his "sincerest acquaintance" - another, English, Graham! Such a sweet story that I feel bad somehow having inherited it from the Grahams; I've already returned it to its shelf on the phone box among Dan Browns and Chris Moyles', left it waiting for another Graham to one day pick it up

[Greta]

Sweet, easy to read, easy listening thus accessible to anyone who likes POEMS.

[Roxanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this long out-of-print 1924 first edition a while ago. Mansfield's poems are odd, and oddly lovely. She uses rhythm and rhyme but not exclusively or heavily. There's a creepiness to some of the poems that is kind of rich and wonderful. Some of the poems have a rawness to them, a sense of something broken that can't be fixed--if you've read Mansfield's short story "Miss Brill", you'll know what I mean. Overall it's a lovely collection. I know that some of Mansfield's poems have been reprinted in new editions in recent years, so at least some of these should be available through mainstream markets.

[melis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A gulf of silence separates us from each other.
I stand at one side of the gulf, you at the other.
I cannot see you or hear you, yet know that you are there.
Often I call you by your childish name
And pretend that the echo to my crying is your voice.
How can we bridge the gulf? Never by speech or touch.
Once I thought we might fill it quite up with tears.
Now I want to shatter it with our laughter.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing poetry is one of the hardest tasks that a writer can take on, for, every word must be the best possible and there is no form of writing where the words depend on each other more to establish the overall meaning. Therefore, there are many good poets, but reaching the highest level is a rare achievement. Mansfield is a good poet.
The poetry in this collection covers a great deal of the human condition, from the joys and fears of childhood to interacting with a grandmother to calmly drinking a cup of tea while the wind howls outside. Several rhyming strategies are used, in most cases no patterns are used throughout an item of verse.
Like much of what was published in the first half of the twentieth century, racism is expressed in a very matter-of-fact form. In “Song by the Window Before Bed” there is the line, “The n**ger trees are laughing too.” The short poem called, “Grown-up Talk” where the subject is where babies come from, there is the line “I suppose God makes the black ones When the saucepan isn’t clean.”
If you are interested in poetry, this is a book that you will likely enjoy. Teachers of high school English will find some short poems that will serve as strong subjects for study in their classes.

[Nastaran · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a few nice poems in this volume. But overall I wasn't impressed at all. I was expecting sth as sophisticated as her short stories and I was somehow disappointed.
Don't set your expectations high.

[Vitani Days · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scriverò poche righe, perché sto riprendendo in mano libri letti tempo fa.
Ci tengo a lasciare almeno un parere, anche se breve, pur non avendoli ormai abbastanza freschi da fare una recensione decente "delle mie" (quest'anno ricomincio, promessa!).
Questo della Mansfield è un libretto di poesie godibile, consigliato a chi, magari, vuol leggere poesie poco... impegnative. Si tratta di una Mansfield giovane, un po' ingenua, e si sente.
Cercherò altro di suo in futuro.

[Heather M L · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a few decent poems, but overall there's really nothing special in this volume of poetry.