Elizabeth Jennings


Elizabeth Jennings was an English poet.

Life and career

Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire. When she was six, her family moved to Oxford, where she remained for the rest of her life. There she later attended St Anne's College. After graduation, she became a writer.
Jennings' early poetry was published in journals such as Oxford Poetry, New English Weekly, The Spectator, Outposts and Poetry Review, but her first book was not published until she was 27. The lyrical poets she cited as having influenced her were Hopkins, Auden, Graves and Muir. Her second book, A Way of Looking, won the Somerset Maugham award and marked a turning point, as the prize money allowed her to spend nearly three months in Rome, which was a revelation. It brought a new dimension to her religious belief and inspired her imagination.
Regarded as traditionalist rather than an innovator, Jennings is known for her lyric poetry and mastery of form. Her work displays a simplicity of metre and rhyme shared with Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn, all members of the group 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. Her deeply held Roman Catholicism coloured much of her work.
She spent the latter years of her life in Unity House in Old Headington and died in a care home in Bampton, Oxfordshire. She is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.
The life and career of "the bag lady of the sonnets", as tabloid newspapers called her when honored by the Queen in 1992, were reviewed in 2018 by Dana Gioia, concluding: "Despite her worldly failures, her artistic career was a steady course of achievement. Jennings ranks among the finest British poets of the second half of the twentieth century. She is also England’s best Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins."
Jennings was a very prolific poet, meaning that she wrote many poems. Yet somehow she always managed to go back to her usual themes: love, religion, death, etc. Her poems are meant to engage lots of people who have suffered what she has, or perhaps shared experiences.

Selected honours and awards

Poetry collections