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Edith Sitwell
Modernist Poet
(1887-1964)
Among women in the
20th century, Edith Sitwell, English poet,
towers above other writers. Born in England in
1887, Sitwell loved her visits to the United
States, spent significant amounts of time
writing in Paris and Italy, but lived most of
her life among family and friends in England.
Reared by a family who had ancestral ties to
Plantagenet kings, Sitwell’s education took
place under the guidance of governesses and in
company of her two younger brothers, Osbert and
Sacheverell, usually at the family estate,
Renishaw. Even so, most of those circumstances
worked against her as a writer. During the late
20th century, her prolific publications were
dismissed by one influential American critic as
belonging to the realm of society, rather than
of letters. And because so many Sitwell admirers
were, indeed, more fascinated with her personal
life and circumstances rather than understanding
her poetry, the critic’s judgment stuck and
prominent feminist writers also ignored her
work. Compelled to wear back braces during her
formative years, enduring the humiliation of her
mother’s jailing for debts at sixteen, suffering
depression during the late 1920’s and the
poverty of homelessness in her advanced years,
Sitwell’s writing, especially her best poetry,
became buried under the avalanche of personal
events.
But the energy and beauty of her writing
endures, “With eyelids closed as soft as the
breeze/That glows from gold flowers on the
incense-trees” (from “En Famille”). One of the
truly most “modern” of the “Modernists,” Sitwell,
like her well-known counterparts, T.S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, was innovative.
During the early 20th century, when writers and
painters were striving for radical new ways to
express their discontent with “modern” values of
materialism and industrialism, Sitwell wrote and
produced with music, a group of poems titled
Façade. Many of these poems are based on musical
themes and strive for reader/listener attention
through puzzling juxtaposition of images: “Like
baskets of ripe fruit the bird-songs’ oaten
flutes/All honeyed yellow wound in air . . .
/Are tasting of fresh green anew.” In these
lines from “Mazurka,” the theme of a lively
dance is translated into “lively” images of
sound, taste and color all intermixed together.
Such language techniques were disturbing and
disquieting for most listeners of her age, as
they continue to be in the early 21st century.
But it is her use of a conventional form such as
poetry, with conventional words, arranged in
shocking new ways that causes Sitwell to share
an ethic with artists such as Kandinsky, Matisse
and Picasso who were doing the same thing with
paint. Her work also echoes the most famous
musician of the age—Igor Stravinsky. His
composition, Rite of Spring, jars the listener’s
senses the same way most of the poems in Sitwell’s
Façade, jar the reader’s senses.
Beyond the importance of her early work of
Façade, the compelling humanistic work of her
Gold Coast Customs, her war poetry, “Still Falls
the Rain” and her later lyrical work of Gardeners and Astronomers, Sitwell’s place in
Modernist literature is unmatched. Her mentoring
of other younger poets is what holds her apart
from other women writers. Principally men—all of
whom are better known than she, the poets
include Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, Siegfried
Sassoon and T.S. Eliot. Sitwell’s prolific
correspondence with them and her encouragement
to dozens of others (including a boxer), puts
Sitwell’s influence far beyond her own
compositions. Christian imagery and motifs are
prolific in most of her poetry from 1929 to the
end of her life in 1964, though she did not
convert to Catholicism until 1954. But her
taste, attitudes and gentility under girded much
of the literary milieu in which she functioned.
She was generous and kind in her literary
relationships with other artists as well as her
own brothers—especially considering she was not
eligible to enter, much less use, libraries or
access books, as young men could.
For a woman who was unusually tall—nearly 6 feet
and whose stark facial features provoked
recognition of her noble heritage, Sitwell was a
woman who modeled virtue, gentleness and
strength.
~*~
This article was submitted by
Pamela Slate Liggett.
She was born in Newport News, Virginia and currently resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She
has three grown daughters—two teachers and one
journalist. Pamela has been published in
literary criticism journals and is working on 3
book projects in various stages of completion -
all of which are about women. |
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