In 1942 she published her first collection of poems, Jamaica Dialect Verses, and in 1943 the chief editor of The Gleaner, Jamaica’s main newspaper, offered to pay her for a weekly column on Sundays. By then she had also begun to study Jamaican folklore at Friends’ College, Highgate, and in 1945 she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. She successfully completed the course. In 1947 she went back to Jamaica and was involved in setting up the Little Theatre Movement pantomime, but she had to go back to England because of financial difficulties. In England, she worked for the BBC and for repertory companies in Coventry and Huddersfield. In 1953 she moved to New York where she worked with Eric Coverley on a musical entitled Day In Jamaica and they toured New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In 1954 Coverley and Louise Bennett was married and they returned to Jamaica where Louise worked for the Jamaica Social Welfare Commission for four years.

 

From 1959 to 1961 she lectured in Jamaican folklore and drama at the University of the West Indies. In 1965 she represented Jamaica at the Royal Commonwealth Arts Festival in Britain. She became increasingly popular with the Jamaican masses and hosted a TV programme in the 1970s called Dr Ring Ding. She released several LPs and toured and lectured in many countries, in America, Europe and Africa. Her first collections of poems appeared in Jamaica in the 1940s, but two important collections of her verse were published in Jamaica (Jamaica Labrish (Sangster, 1966) and Selected Poems (Sangster, 1982). From the late 1960s on, she was recognised as a serious writer and embraced by the middle classes, by the theatre-going classes and by the people alike. But her new popularity and official recognition led to her new status as a “national icon” and to some kind of hero-worshipping. She became a symbol of Jamaican culture abroad and her poems were and are still part of Jamaican official culture.

 

Over the years she was awarded numerous awards such as the Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica, the Order of Jamaica and even an MBE. As pointed out by Denise de Caires Narain, very few Jamaican artists have received such a degree of official recognition and Miss Lou is now a national icon. In the post-Independence period, children were taught (and they are still taught today) her poems at school and it is safe to say that there is not one single person in Jamaica who has not learned a Louise Bennett poem. It is very hard to talk to a Jamaican performance poet who has not been influenced by Miss Lou: the dub poets, Jean Breeze, Malachi Smith, Yasus Afari, Mutabaruka, Cherry Natural, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mikey Smith, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, Valerie Bloom, and the list goes on.