Selected Poetry And Prose

by Charlotte Mew

The British poet Charlotte Mew - whose 150th anniversary falls in 2019 - was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again. Two new books on this important writer are being prepared by Faber poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew’s childhood house in Doughty Street.

Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena. Her poetry transfigures that very private suffering into art that has a universal resonance.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

160 pages, Paperback

Published May 19, 2020

About the author

Charlotte Mary Mew was a modernist British poet. Mew's father, architect Frederick Mew, died in 1898 without making adequate provision for his family; two of her siblings suffered from mental illness, and were committed to institutions, and three others died in early childhood leaving Charlotte, her mother and her sister, Anne. Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children.

In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story into The Yellow Book, but wrote very little poetry at this time. Her first collection of poetry, The Farmer's Bride, was published in 1916. Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy, who called her the best woman poet of her day, Virginia Woolf, who said she was "very good and quite unlike anyone else," and Siegfried Sassoon. She obtained a small Civil List pension with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare. This helped ease her financial difficulties.

After the death of her sister, she descended into a deep depression, and was admitted to a nursing home where she eventually committed suicide by drinking Lysol. Mew is buried in Hampstead Cemetery.

Reviews

[Kobe · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5⭐️

[Navya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book as a happy accident, and I am so glad I did.

Mew is perhaps not as celebrated as she should be. Both her technical proficiency and emotional command were fantastic in this collection. I particularly liked her on the topics of grief and mortality, or when she is fighting God.

[Miri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This exquisitely edited and beautifully composed set of poems and short fiction ranges from the clandestine, autobiographical tone of Emily Brontë or Christina Rossetti, to the lurid obliqueness of Baudelaire and the colourful, autobiographical beauty of Virgina Woolf. Mew deserves to be as famous as Joyce, Hardy or any of the other modernist poets and writers of the 20s that are so worshipped today.

[Lucy Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should be more iconic

[leanneslibrary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most underrated author I have ever read

[Alex Sarll]

If you were making up a lost poet, you might well end up with someone like Charlotte Mew; born in Bloomsbury a little too early to quite fit the Set, generally assumed to have been queer (though the editor of this edition, Julia Copus, disagrees so firmly as to amuse), her life a series of encounters and correspondences with more famous names while her family take it in turns to go mad and/or die, until she eventually joins them on both counts. And the titles of her collections, The Farmer's Bride and The Rambling Sailor, suggest the sort of sentimentality with which Housman was already slightly pushing it as a late Victorian, and that that had definitely missed its moment by the tens and twenties of the next century. There is a bit of that here; in particular, like so many writers, she was never held back by the least awareness that she can't do the accent. But even then, there's usually something haunted to catch the attention, a sort of semi-private lexicon of hints at the grand and terrible world behind the veil that, at its most developed, becomes a kind of pioneer modernism. In particular, her longest poem, Madeleine In Church, is magnificent, a flash-forward to the wrestling with ebbing faith of Eliot, Plath and Larkin.

The prose, on the other hand, didn't quite convince me, even while it also read like foreshadowing of later greats. Copus notes a deliberate choice to steer away from Mew "at her most ornate", then opens with The London Sunday. Put it this way; I love Virginia Woolf's London essays, but if something makes me think of those except if they were fussier and more prone to condescension, that's probably not great. Similarly, the story A White Night, where British sightseers find themselves encountering something terrible when they get trapped in a European church, inevitably recalls Aickman's Cicerones – but Aickman knew how to more deeply unsettle by leaving more out. I think my pick of them would be An Old Servant, which surprises me, given it's an unshowy reminiscence of someone who sounds very trying; on paper, something that wouldn't interest me at all, but done well and concisely enough that it hits like the poems.

[Antilibrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charlotte Mew, Selected Poetry and Prose (ed. Julia Copus).
:

"...the world must die with me."
—Impossibility, Mew

Spring is incomplete without reading some Charlotte Mew. This is the only poet I consider to be the last great transitional bridge between the Victorian and Modernist periods.

The deep influence of British Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelites, and obviously Hardy is unmistakable. There are some hints of Graveyard Poets and their style of writing.

Her two volumes of poems that we treasure are: The Farmer's Bride (1916/1921) and The Rambling Sailor (1929). Writing during WWI and constantly suffering economically do introduce a sense of urgency to her poems. The Hardys were her patron!

Anyway, sharing some passages on Spring here. If you are reading Mew for the first time then definitely read: 'The Saturday Market' (an abortion poem, which she used to read out loud to the Hardys), 'In Nunhead Cemetery,' 'The Farmer's Bride,' 'The Quiet House,' 'Ken,' 'The Forest Road,' 'Madeleine in Church,' 'The Rambling Sailor' (referencing Colerdige's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), 'Fin de Fête,' and 'The Trees are Down.'

The countryside, outcasts, trees, greenery, birds, and windows are recurring themes in most of these poems. Reading 'The Saturday Market,' which for me is Mew's greatest poem (and opinions may vary on this) on a Saturday morning in Spring is quite an out of body experience! You could tell that Spring really excited her—as a season, sentiment, emotion, and mood that captured a promise of vernal rejuvenation when countries were killing each other during the War. ❤️

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[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mew, like the best original from any creative genre, worked both within and outside of traditional frameworks. Her ear for the metre and rhyme of a line show her debt to the lyric tradition, but her exploration of characters, particularly outsiders, and her use of dramatic monologue, feel very new. Mew was both desperately lonely and fiercely empathetic, and, using unforgettable imagery and a cast of strange, sometimes pathetic, characters, she explores these qualities through inventing a series of lives parallel to her own. She reminds me of another of my favourite outsiders, the French poet Rimbaud: shadowy and hard to define, publishing few works while alive, yet burning with talent, and, once encountered, impossible to forget.

When Charlotte Mew was discussing Emily Bronte in an essay from 1904, she said, "When we first read these songs, we are brought face to face with the woman who wrote them. And when we know them and have been haunted by their rebellious and contending music, it will not be possible to forget." She could have been writing about herself.

[Mauberley]

A wonderful discovery. I was pointed in the right direction by John Carey's wonderful introduction in his recent "Little History of Poetry". Her dramatic monologues are masterpieces of concision. Truly a modern voice although she was born in 1869. Greatly admired by Hardy - The Master must have smiled to himself as he read these poems, delighted to recognize a kindred spirit (and such a marvellous student). The collection has been well edited by Julia Copus.

[Anne Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some lovely lyrical poems here which I very much enjoyed, though I was less enthused about the longer ones. I think Mew's short poems can be very powerful indeed. The prose is rather dated though still well written of course. A good selection.

[Robin Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

On The Road To The Sea, Madeleine in Church, A Quoi Bon Dire, In Nunhead Cemetery

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I <3 charlotte mew

[Izzy]

romanticising rain and trees and death >>>>

[ElegantJo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insight into a rarely mentioned poet and writer, this was beautifully presented and painstakingly researched for accuracy and adherence to the writer's original work. My favourite poem from the collection is "The Farmer's Bride", which is what drew me to this poet, when I heard it featured on Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. I also enjoyed the prose pieces, especially "The Old Servant", an observation and tribute to Mew's own nursery maid/servant.