Alexander Smith (poet) - Literary Works

Literary Works

Smith's first published poem (in Spenserian stanzas) appeared in James Hedderwick's Glasgow Citizen in 1850. By this time Smith had already fallen under the spell of the Revd George Gilfillan, a Church of Scotland minister in Dundee and self-appointed herald of a new breed of young poets. Encouraged by the Addisonians, Smith sent poems to Gilfillan who encouraged him to weld them together into a long poem in semi-dramatic form. Thus was ‘A Life Drama’ born and subsequently heralded by Gilfillan in The Critic in 1851–2 with a series of extracts. By the time it appeared in book form as Poems in 1853 it was a sensation. Around this time Smith paid his one and only visit to London to be fêted by literati such as G. H. Lewes.

With £100 in advance royalties from his publisher, Smith had given up the muslin warehouse. ‘A Life Drama’ catapulted him from total obscurity to being talked of in the same breath as Tennyson and Arnold. He was now one of the most notable names in a loose group headed by Sydney Dobell. The florid diction and sensational subject matter that typified this group (the so-called Spasmodics) in the mid-1850s also influenced Tennyson's Maud. Smith had no rich patron; luckily one or two influential figures helped to secure him the post of secretary to Edinburgh College (later University) in 1854. The job allowed him a few spare hours in the day for writing, as well as the long summer vacation, but it was no sinecure, especially when he also took on the duties of registrar and secretary to the university council in 1858. Through the university connection Smith met eminent academics such as John Stuart Blackie, professor of Greek and early Scottish nationalist, and William Aytoun, professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres and noted parodist. But in general he preferred the company of freelance writers and artists such as Horatio McCulloch.

In 1854 Sydney Dobell (pseudonym Sydney Yendys) was staying in Edinburgh and he and Smith collaborated on Sonnets on the War (1855), an unashamedly jingoistic contribution on the Crimean War, based mainly on newspaper reports but also possibly on first-hand accounts by William ‘Crimean’ Simpson, a Glaswegian lithographic artist who had covered the campaign for the Illustrated London News. While this project was being jointly created both were parodied by Aytoun in Blackwood's Magazine (May 1854) in a spoof review of a long narrative poem ‘Firmilian, or, The Student of Badajoz: a Spasmodic Tragedy’ by T. Percy Jones. Further extracts were to follow from Aytoun's wickedly inventive pen: the Spasmodics and Gilfillan were effectively deflated but Smith's original Poems continued to reprint.

In 1857 Smith's next collection, City Poems, showed that he had taken the criticism to heart and lightened his poetic palette. None the less there was unfavourable criticism. It included some of his best works, including the memorable ‘Glasgow’, an early example of city poetry. An anonymous letter (now known to be from William Allingham) in The Athenaeum had accused Smith of wholesale plagiarism and there was a furious correspondence over several issues contributed by detractors and supporters. The campaign was effectively orchestrated by The Athenaeum's literary editor, Henry Chorley, and it set the tone for negative reviews of City Poems which Smith had hoped would bring him a useful supplement to his secretary's income.

Smith's long narrative poem Edwin of Deira (1861) was immediately castigated as a pale shadow of Idylls of the King, and although he continued to write poetry Smith realized that he had to turn to prose to make a regular second income and support his growing family. He became a frequent contributor to Blackwood's Magazine,Macmillan's, and Alexander Strahan's Good Words, producing work that was personal, characterized by a distinctive persona. Montaigne was Smith's inspiration and model for many of these pieces and in particular for Dreamthorp: a Book of Essays Written in the Country, published by Strahan in 1863. One of the themes that runs through the individual essays in the collection is an understanding that human finiteness contributes to our awareness of joy and beauty in the everyday. This paradox is powerfully conveyed in ‘A Lark's Flight’, an episode based on the public hanging of two Irish navvies which took place in the east end of Glasgow where Smith spent his boyhood. A moment before the trap is sprung both the silent crowd and the condemned men are assailed by the spiralling notes of a lark ‘out of the grassy space at the foot of the scaffold, in the dead silence audible to all’.

Awareness of mortality was early in Smith's thoughts. In the first stanza of ‘Glasgow’ (written in 1854) he seems to presage his own untimely death: ‘Before me runs a road of toil/With my grave cut across’. In the last two years of his life he completed A Summer in Skye (1865) which comprised some earlier pieces done for Blackwood's Magazine and Temple Bar. He also completed a strikingly original prose portrait of Edinburgh; a novel serialized in eleven episodes in Good Words; the editing and introduction to the Golden Treasury edition of Burns; the introduction to Golden Leaves from the American Poets; as well as poems and essays for which there was now a ready periodical market. He was writing ‘in the shadow of the Shade’, as Henley wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson, aware that he must leave an inheritance for his dependants.