James Kenneth Stephen - Poetry

Poetry

Stephen became a published poet, his work being identified by the initials J. K. S. His collections of poems Lapsus Calami and Quo Musa Tendis were both published in 1891. Rudyard Kipling called him "that genius" and told how he "dealt with Haggard and me in some stanzas which I would have given much to have written myself". Those stanzas, in which Stephen deplores the state of contemporary writing, appear in his poem 'To R. K.':

Will there never come a season
Which shall rid us from the curse
Of a prose which knows no reason
And an unmelodious verse:
When the world shall cease to wonder
At the genius of an Ass,
And a boy's eccentric blunder
Shall not bring success to pass:

When mankind shall be delivered
From the clash of magazines,
And the inkstand shall be shivered
Into countless smithereens:
When there stands a muzzled stripling,
Mute, beside a muzzled bore:
When the Rudyards cease from Kipling
And the Haggards Ride no more.

J. K Stephen was at Cambridge at the same time as the distinguished antiquarian and writer of ghost-stories, Montagu R. James, and mentions him at the end of a curious Latin celebration of then-current worthies of 'Coll. Regale' (King's College):

Vivat J.K. Stephanus,
Humilis poeta!
Vivat Monty Jamesius,
Vivant A, B, C, D, E
Et totus Alphabeta!

Stephen wrote a satirical pastiche of Thomas Gray's Ode to the Distant Prospect of Eton College pillorying Eton for being Tory.

A poem which gave him a reputation as a misogynist is In the Backs (The Backs is a riverside area of Cambridge), where he describes a woman he does not know but to whom he takes a violent dislike:

...I do not want to see that girl again:
I did not like her: and I should not mind
If she were done away with, killed, or ploughed.
She did not seem to serve a useful end :
And certainly she was not beautiful.

However many of his other poems show that he may not have been as misogynistic as previously believed.

Stephen was a member of the Cambridge "Apostles".