The Poetry of Sitwell by Edith Sitwell
"The Poetry of Sitwell" by Edith Sitwell explores the distinctive and often extravagant style of poetry that emerged during the early 20th century, particularly in the context of World War I. Sitwell, alongside her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, became notable figures on the London literary scene, employing flamboyant and self-aware tones to challenge the prevailing norms of a monotonous industrial era. Her early work, characterized by striking musicality, is exemplified in collaborations with composers like William Walton, which enhanced her hypnotic and playful verse. Sitwell's poetry often experiments with sensory experiences, incorporating innovative imagery and associations to evoke deeper emotional responses. Over time, her themes evolved to reflect the complexities of war and human suffering, showcasing a shift from whimsical portrayals to profound reflections on life and death. Notable works such as "Still Falls the Rain" and her later explorations of the atomic age reveal her capacity to infuse traditional symbols with contemporary significance, ultimately crafting a body of work that remains impactful. While Sitwell's poetry may not have achieved the same level of fame as contemporaries like T.S. Eliot, it nonetheless holds a unique place in the literary canon, with a legacy that continues to resonate.
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The Poetry of Sitwell by Edith Sitwell
First published:CLOWNS’ HOUSES, 1918; THE WOODEN PEGASUS 1920; FACADE, 1922; BUCOLIC COMEDIES, 1923; THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, 1924; TROY PARK, 1925; ELEGY ON DEAD FASHION, 1926; RUSTIC ELEGIES, 1927; POEMS OLD AND NEW, 1940; STREET SONGS, 1942; GREEN SONG AND OTHER POEMS, 1944; THE SONG OF THE COLD, 1945; THE SHADOW OF CAIN, 1947; POOR MAN’S MUSIC, 1950; GARDENERS AND ASTRONOMERS: NEW POEMS, 1953; COLLECTED POEMS, 1954
Critical Evaluation:
Notoriety was achieved by Edith Sitwell instantly when she and her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, burst upon the London literary scene during the period of World War I, each of them striving in flamboyant and self-mocking fashion to live eccentrically against the grain of a dull industrial world. This early pose was maintained by Edith Sitwell all her life.
Extravagant too were the verses of her earliest period, well suited for the brittle musical setting given FACADE by her composer friend, William Walton. The music was performed with the poet herself chanting her hypnotic and quasi-nonsensical lines about Daisy and Lily. Equally absurd but dazzling to the ear is the poem “Sir Beelzebub.”
Only a perceptive few noted, however, that Miss Sitwell’s extravagance was serious and that in her own amusing, provocative way she was forging a poetic instrument that would eventually do as much as the poetic practices of the better-known poets Pound and Eliot. When she began to write, she said later, the conventional rhythms, outworn language, and stale imagery made necessary a new direction and more immediate effects of sight and sound in poetry. So when she wrote of the morning light in its “creaking” descent she was endeavoring to make the reader hear the morning as well as see it, and thus feel a new dimension to the dawn. The same deepening of sensuous experience is found in many of her poems during this period. Trees, for example, are compared to hissing green geese; the wind is a blue-maned horse that whinnies and neighs. Some of Miss Sitwell’s experiments in synesthesia are strained and excessive, but just as often she does achieve that newness called for by Ezra Pound that is the goal of all good poets. Every reader of Miss Sitwell’s criticism of her own work and of that of others, in essays and prefaces, instantly recognizes her keen ear and her constant concern with the relation between sense and sound in poetry, a concern that lay behind all her experimentation and made her deliberately strain or even break old associational patterns in her quest for fresh effects.
Miss Sitwell was obviously a student of the later Yeats and of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but her own work had a different cast and, as the years went by, a meaning all its own. Though the verbal techniques of FACADE are clearly on display in GOLD COAST CUSTOMS, its structure presented ideas and feelings never imagined by dazzled and largely amused audiences of Miss Sitwell’s earlier work. Still chic, on one level her re-creation of savagery and cannibalism is obviously part of the 1920’s movement that brought primitive art into modern culture, to be found in sculpture and in the early music of Stravinsky and Prokovieff. But like the novelist Conrad, Miss Sitwell shows, as the poem goes on, that the river of darkness flows through London as well as through The Congo. Cannibal feasts become the equivalents of Lady Bamburgher’s stupid but fashionable parties, and Miss Sitwell creates a depiction of a spiritual wasteland that has not achieved the fame of T. S. Eliot’s, but is not unworthy of comparison with it. The Negro worships a black stone that stands upright on a bone. But Lady Bamburgher’s god never lived at all. Unable to live or die, her god suffers as one in a trance, capable of hearing and bearing everything and yet remaining immobile.
The spirit of Blake, perhaps, tries to sing out here above her images of cannibalism new and old. Through most of the 1940’s Miss Sitwell devoted herself to criticism and biography (most notably in her volume on Alexander Pope). But World War II challenged her concern, by now become agony, and found a talent that was worthy of the suffering of the time. Christ’s image is now fundamental and right in her “Still Falls the Rain,” called by C. M. Bowra, among others, one of the most moving, memorable poems in English about the war. From the magnificent ambiguity of the first word “still” as “always” and also as profound quietness, the comparison between man and god both dying forever is evoked in a contemporary hymn that purges finally profound terror through profound pity. In the poem the still-falling rain eventually becomes the blood from Christ’s side, still shed for mankind.
More and more, as war’s horror increased, Miss Sitwell found herself capable of turning the traditional images of light, of blood, of the rose of love into poems that somehow made the present meaningful through placing it in perspective with the past. Man’s inhuman use of technology creates a new ice age in “The Song of the Cold,” in which the poet finds the deadly chill in the heart of man himself. In “The Shadow of Cain” the whimsy of FACADE has become frozen in a new kind of terror.
Hiroshima provided her with a new vision of the cities of Cain, where the sun descended and the earth ascended in a totemic emblem of destruction and loss. Throughout her famous “Three Poems of the Atomic Age,” Miss Sitwell evokes the terrible contrast between the old sun that nourished and gave life, and this new one of man’s that kills and destroys. Yet the terrible cloud that brilliantly blossoms also evokes the rose, the traditional image of love both physical and spiritual, and through Miss Sitwell’s nightmare vision Christ appears in the terrible rain and walks on seas of blood.
The craft that merely seemed so fashionably clever in the 1920’s came a long way before its end, unlike many of the lesser talents of that promising day. Though Miss Sitwell did not write so much as Yeats, or so intensely as Eliot, she nevertheless wrote a body of work that promises to live.