Edith Sitwell

English poet.

• Born: September 7, 1887
• Birthplace: Scarborough, England
• Died: December 9, 1964
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

Edith Sitwell, one of the twentieth century’s foremost poets and a flamboyant exponent of experimentation in verse, was the oldest child of Sir George Sitwell, fourth baronet of Renishaw Park, the family seat for six hundred years. Much of the extravagant personality of Edith and her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, is readily understandable to the reader of Sir Osbert Sitwell’s memoirs of their outrageous father, Left Hand, Right Hand.

Educated in secret (as she said), Edith Sitwell first became known in 1916 as the editor of an anthology, Wheels, which stridently featured for six years her own work, that of her brothers, and other authors whose voices were to be heard frequently in the 1920s. One of the highlights of the 1925 theater season in London was the premiere of Sitwell’s Facade, in which she chanted her early fanciful and rhythmical verse to similarly exciting musical settings provided by William Walton. For the performance Sitwell spoke through an amplifying mask behind a screen, a device to provide artificiality for the exotic occasion. The London Hall was an uproar of Sitwell’s admirers and detractors. Twenty-five years later, the work was similarly performed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but so far had modern taste and Sitwell’s reputation advanced that the last occasion was almost regal in dignity, as befitted its central performer—Sitwell had been given the accolade of Grand Dame of the Cross of the British Empire in 1954.

Her flair for self-dramatization made students of literature uneasy about the seriousness of her poetry for a long time. Standing six feet in height, she always appeared in extravagant and archaic costumes and headgear, often medieval, spangled with ostentatious rings and necklaces. "I have always had a great affinity for Queen Elizabeth [I]," she said once. "We were born on the same day of the month and about the same hour of the day."

Although her Dadaist stunts were calculated to express her love of being flamboyant and of irritating the stuffy ("Good taste," she claimed, "is the worst vice ever invented"), her interest in poetry was serious, as was her talent. Her keenness for verbal experimentation found a fit subject in the extraordinary Gold Coast Customs, her own version of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and one of the remarkable poems of the remarkable decade of the 1920s.

For ten years after Gold Coast Customs Sitwell wrote little poetry, devoting herself to critical essays and nonfiction, including a biography of Alexander Pope, but mainly taking care of a friend, Helen Rootham, through her fatal illness. With the coming of World War II, Sitwell returned to poetry, still with her dazzling technical equipment but now with a rich store of traditional Christian imagery, having become a Roman Catholic in 1955. The agonies of the bombardment of London and the terror of the atomic bomb evoked from Sitwell some of the most moving poetry ever written about the cruelty of war.

Along with her delight in self-dramatization, Sitwell was renowned, from the publication of Wheels all through her life, for her championship of younger writers. Dylan Thomas is but one of the best known of the writers whose verbal experimentation she praised and championed early in their careers. Sitwell died in London in 1964 at the age of seventy-seven, and continues to be remembered as an eccentric but influential and respected artist.

Author Works

Poetry:

The Mother, and Other Poems, 1915

Twentieth Century Harlequinade, and Other Poems, 1916 (with Osbert Sitwell)

Clown’s Houses, 1918

The Wooden Pegasus, 1920

Facade, 1922

Bucolic Comedies, 1923

The Sleeping Beauty, 1924

Troy Park, 1925

Poor Young People, 1925 (with Osbert Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell)

Elegy on Dead Fashion, 1926

Rustic Elegies, 1927

Popular Song, 1928

Five Poems, 1928

Gold Coast Customs, 1929

Collected Poems, 1930

In Spring, 1931

Epithalamium, 1931

Five Variations on a Theme, 1933

Selected Poems, 1936

Poems New and Old, 1940

Street Songs, 1942

Green Song, and Other Poems, 1944

The Weeping Babe, 1945

The Song of the Cold, 1945

The Shadow of Cain, 1947

The Canticle of the Rose, 1949

Facade, and Other Poems, 1950

Gardeners and Astronomers, 1953

Collected Poems, 1954

The Outcasts, 1962

Music and Ceremonies, 1963

Selected Poems, 1965

The Early Unpublished Poems of Edith Sitwell, 1994

Long Fiction:

I Live Under a Black Sun, 1937

Nonfiction:

Poetry and Criticism, 1925

Alexander Pope, 1930

Bath, 1932

The English Eccentrics, 1933

Aspects of Modern Poetry, 1934

Victoria of England, 1936

Trio, 1938 (with Osbert Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell)

A Poet’s Notebook, 1943

Fanfare for Elizabeth, 1946

A Notebook on William Shakespeare, 1948

The Queens and the Hive, 1962

Taken Care Of, 1965

Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell, 1997 (Richard Greene, editor)

Edited Texts:

Wheels, 1916–1921

The Pleasures of Poetry, 1930–1932, 1934

Planet and Glow Worm, 1944

A Book of Winter, 1950

The American Genius, 1951

A Book of Flowers, 1952

The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry, 1958

Bibliography

Brophy, James D. Edith Sitwell: The Symbolist Order. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Brophy examines the themes and techniques of Sitwell’s admittedly difficult poetry. He finds in her work a coherent use of modernist symbolism. A valuable study for close analysis of her poems and critical views. Supplemented by a select bibliography and an index.

Cevasco, G. A. The Sitwells: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Edith and her younger brothers, all writers and famous personalities, are brought together in an excellent, compact survey of their writings and family life. Their texts are shown to respond to the major events that shaped the twentieth century: two world wars, an economic depression, and the opening of the atomic age. Contains a chronology, notes, a select bibliography, and an index.

Elborn, Geoffrey. Edith Sitwell: A Biography. London: Sheldon Press, 1981. Traces Sitwell’s life, from her birth as an unwanted female to her solitary death (by her own command). Includes photographs that illustrate her life, twelve half-plates, two plates, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Glendinning, Victoria. Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions. London: Phoenix, 1993. Revisionary appraisal separates the myths from the newer status of Sitwell’s work. Glendinning discusses Sitwell’s poetry, her criticism, and her literary relationships. Includes six plates, seventeen half-plates, notes, and an index.

Pearson, John. Facades: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell. London: Macmillan, 1978. A detailed, year-by-year account of the literary activities, travels, and relationships of the famous sister and her brothers, which places Sitwell in her literary environment. Photographs are placed throughout the text. Contains seventeen plates, notes, and an index.

Salter, Elizabeth. The Last Years of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell. London: Bodley Head, 1967. Salter was secretary to the poet from the time Sitwell was sixty-nine until her death. The author brings out Sitwell’s humor, her loyalty, and her creative power. Salter has also published a companion book of extraordinary photographs and drawings. Presents an inside view from a devoted friend. Includes five plates, and six half-plates.

Sitwell, Edith. Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell. Edited by Richard Greene. Rev. ed. London: Virago, 1998. A collection including previously unpublished letters to a remarkable array of notables, including Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, Cecil Beaton, Kingsley Amis, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.