‘A Summing Up of All I Have Ever Thought’: Adrian Stokes’s ‘In Short’ (1942) and his Other Writings of the Period

The intertextual links between Stokes’s unpublished essay ‘In Short’ (1942) and his other writings of the period justify his own estimation of it as ‘a summing up of all I have ever thought incorporating experience of six years of daily psycho-analysis’. This and other texts, now found among Stokes's papers in the Tate Archive, reveal him, especially in the first half of his career, to be a writer continually engaged in a retrospective integration and adjustment of idea and expression.