Collected Poems

Scovell E. J.

E. J. Scovell has made her own terms with poetry. She has published only four book-length collections, her first in 1944, though she started writing in the 1920s. This volume reveals that she has not been as "scarce" a poet as her admirers have believed. She has been overlooked by anthologists and critics, partly because her work was long out-of-print until the beginning of a revival in 1982, and partly because the path she chose to follow did not cross the busy highways of fashion.

She wrote of her poems: "I should like the surface to be entirely clear, and the meaning to be entirely implicit; I should like the reader to understand what I say, so that along with it he may apprehend something I do not say, but which the subject of my poem expresses to me, and could to him".

About the Author

E. J. Scovell was born in 1907, and was educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She was married to the ecologist Charles Elton and lived in Oxford. She spent some time in the West Indies, and worked with her husband in the South and Central American rain forests. She died in 1999.

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