EDITH !

“A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.” – Edith Sitwell

For amusement and entertainment, how can we go wrong if we were to choose Dame Edith Sitwell’s poetry? I am in need of some frivolity at the moment, so here is my choice for Poetry Tuesday, still wonderfully hosted by Sans Souci!

Edith Sitwell (1907-1964) was an amazing proponent of the English poetic avant garde in the first half of the 20th century, a champion of modernity who revelled in shocking and courting her readers, with clever tactics designed to push the boundaries of poetry. Her (per)verse writings succeeded in angering traditionalists of the time, but nowadays we regard them with as much pleasure as she had in putting them to paper.

Aubade (1923)

Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again;
Comb your cockscomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane, come down the stair.
Each dull blunt wooden stalactite
Of rain creaks, hardened by the light,
Sounding like an overtone
From some lonely world unknown.
But the creaking empty light
Will never harden into sight,
Will never penetrate your brain
With overtones like the blunt rain.
The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden,
Cockscomb flowers that none will pluck,
And wooden flowers that ‘gin to cluck.
In the kitchen you must light
Flames as staring, red and white,
As carrots or as turnips shining
Where the cold dawn light lies whining.
Cockscomb hair on the cold wind
Hangs limp, turns the milk’s weak mind…
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again!

Dame Edith Sitwell
From Bucolic Comedies | 1923

The Fan (1923)

Lovely Semiramis
Closes her slanting eyes:
Dead is she long ago.
From her fan, sliding slow,
Parrot-bright fire’s feathers,
Gilded as June weathers,
Plumes bright and shrill as grass
Twinkle down; as they pass
Through the green glooms in Hell
Fruits with a tuneful smell,
Grapes like an emerald rain,
Where the full moon has lain,
Greengages bright as grass,
Melons as cold as glass,
Piled on each gilded booth,
Feel their cheeks growing smooth.
Apes in plumed head-dresses
Whence the bright heat hisses,—
Nubian faces, sly
Pursing mouth, slanting eye,
Feel the Arabian
Winds floating from the fan.

Dame Edith Sitwell

Edith Louisa Sitwell was born in 1887 to an aristocratic family and she spent most of her childhood at her parents' home Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire. The first child and only daughter of an unhappy marriage, Edith never gained the respect and compassion that her brothers Osbert (born in 1892) and Sacheverell (born in 1897) experienced from their parents. She was educated at home and began writing poetry when she was about twenty, but the major change in her life came when she moved to London in 1914 to share a flat with Helen Rootham, her former governess.

Through her poetry, Sitwell challenged prevailing twentieth century British attitudes concerning literature and poetry. Sitwell's satiric poetry contradicted the bucolic, Georgian poetry of the day. In 1915, Sitwell published her first collection “The Mother and Other Poems”, although her role as editor of Wheels, an anthology of contemporary works published in 1916, gained her the most notoriety. She also used her poetic talents to oppose England's role in the first World War, and wrote politically dissident poetry at the end of World War II, specifically, "Still Falls the Rain" from Street Songs (1942), about bombing raids in London, and "Three Poems of the Atomic Age," based on the bombing of Hiroshima.

Not only was Sitwell a talented political poet, but she was a talented performer as well. Allanah Harper, founder of Echanges, described Edith Sitwell during a performance writing "she began to recite and a window opened onto an enchanted world. Each vowel and consonant flowed and she seemed to weave her poetry in the air. The world became heightened and transformed until I could see a whole landscape there behind her eyes." Sitwell's melodic voice coupled with highly syncopated lyrics lead to the success of her most famous work “Façade” (1922). Intended to be performed, instead of silently read, the poems of Façade focused on the sound and effect of chosen words instead of their meaning. The poems in Gold Coast Customs (1929) capitalized on rhythm just as in “Façade”, but they demonstrated a political seriousness absent from the previous work.

During the mid-1920s, Sitwell and her roommate Helen Rootham traveled frequently to Paris to visit Helen's sister Evelyn Weil. In Paris, Sitwell found a city filled with creativity and artistic talents, some of whom became influential friends, including Gertrude Stein. Sitwell enjoyed Gertrude's work and championed the modernist poet's 1926 Oxford and Cambridge lectures which effectively raised Gertrude's literary profile in Britain. It was in Gertrude's salon that Sitwell met the surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew, with whom she would enter perhaps her most important, yet often unfulfilling, relationship.

To Pavel Tchelitchew, a Russian émigré and artist, she was both a patron and muse. Unfortunately for Sitwell, Pavel's interest in her was purely intellectual, and possibly financial. The charming, passionate, and sometimes moody Pavel directed his amorous attention to the young American pianist, Allen Tanner, and eventually to Charles Henri Ford. Despite her difficulties with Pavel and her roommate Helen Rootham, whose ill-health and demanding nature caused much of Sitwell's anxiety, Sitwell managed to compile “The English Eccentrics” (1933) and the controversial “Aspects of Modern Poetry” (1934).

Sitwell's relationships with other literary figures were much less hostile than her relationship with Pavel. She became patron to other authors, including Dylan Thomas, was close friends with poets H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Bryher, and became the goddaughter of Evelyn Waugh and Roy Campbell after her conversion to Catholicism in 1955.

In the 1930s Sitwell shifted her literary efforts from poetry toward prose after the success of her well-received historical biography “Alexander Pope” (1930). Sitwell's other historical biographies, “Victoria of England” (1936), “Fanfare for Elizabeth” (1946), and its sequel “The Queens and the Hive” (1962), are some of her best known works of prose. “I Live under a Black Sun” (1937), her only published novel, came out the year her mother died.

During the early 1950s, Edith Sitwell received numerous honours. Four honorary doctorates from Leeds, Durham, Oxford, and Sheffield universities were bestowed upon her. In 1954, she was made Dame Commander of the British Empire in the Queen's birthday honours list.

Failing health and troubles with Osbert's lover David Horner forced Sitwell to move away from her childhood home in Renishaw and spend the final years of her life in a small flat and, later, a Queen Anne style cottage she called "Bryher House" in Hempstead. During her later years, with the help of her personal assistant Elizabeth Salter, Edith published her final volume of poetry “The Outcasts” (1962) and the sequel to “Fanfare for Elizabeth”, “The Queens and the Hive” (1962). Sitwell died in 1964 and her autobiography “Taken Care Of” was published posthumously in 1965.