Jennings, Elizabeth, 1926-2001

Elizabeth Joan Jennings was born on July 18, 1926, in Boston, Lincolnshire, England, to Henry Cecil Jennings, a medical officer of health, and Helen Mary Turner. Raised as a Roman Catholic, she attended Rye St. Antony School and later Oxford High School. When Jennings was thirteen years old she discovered poetry, first struck by Chesterton's The Battle of Lepanto. She found early encouragement in teachers and an uncle, himself a poet. Jennings studied English at St. Anne's College, Oxford from 1944-1949 where she was first published in 1949 in the annual anthology, Oxford Poetry (1949). By 1953 she also published Poems (1953) through Oscar Mellor's Fantasy Press. Jennings and a number of friends from Oxford, including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and Thom Gunn were the main contributors to Robert Conquest's anthology New Lines (1956) in 1956. This established the "Movement," a literary movement that was anti-romantic and focused on themes of rationality and sobriety.

A Way of Looking (1955) garnered Jennings the Somerset Maugham Award in 1956. The award was established for young writers to enrich their craft by traveling abroad, and Jennings did so by means of a three month stay in Italy. Those three months influenced Jennings throughout the rest of her life and work. In 1961 Jennings published Song for a Birth or a Death (1961), a book of religiously inspired poetry, and, in 1962, she was featured in the first volume of the Penguin Modern Poets (1962). At this time she was hospitalized for mental illness, during which time she wrote poems like "Sequence in Hospital," appearing in Recoveries (1964).

Upon her release, she published prolifically, often returning to and revising her previous work, which appeared in successive editions of her Collected Poems (1967). She also published the book Growing Points (1975) in 1975 which featured dominant themes of destruction and rejuvenation, as well as children's poetry with advice to children.

Jennings earned financial success with the titles Selected Poems (1979) and Collected Poems (1986); the latter earned her a W.H. Smith Award in 1987. Yet, she seems to have experienced financial difficulty later in life despite being one of the most well-known and respected poets of the time. Many considered her eccentric and she was criticized by the press for receiving the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (C.B.E) at Buckingham Palace in 1992 looking like a "bag lady."

Her poems and letters reflect her many friendships as well as her interest in the arts with various collections of books, music boxes, and doll house furniture. Jennings died of heart failure in Oxford on October 26, 2001.