Sitwell, Edith
NAME: Sitwell, Edith
ACHIEVEMENTS: Modernist poet
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Sept. 7, 1887. Scarborough, Yorkshire, England
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: Dec. 9, 1964. London, England. 77
DISCIPLINE: Literature
FIELD: Poet
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Sir George Sitwell, Lady Ida Sitwell
SIBLINGS: Sir Osbert Sitwell , Sir Sacheverell Sitwell
SPOUSE:
CHILDREN:
EDUCATION: Private
MAJOR WORK: Façade, Gold Coast Customs
LIFE AND TIMES:
Sitwell’s position as the daughter of an aristocrat did not ensure her happiness; in her autobiography, she claimed she always felt distanced from her parents. Her father was described as an “extreme eccentric” and an “impossible parent,” while her mother was constantly upset by her daughter’s appearance.
Edith was the first child of an odd and unhappy marriage that also produced her two younger brothers, Osbert, born in 1892, and Sacheverell, born in 1897. The three children were all fortunate enough to have literary talent. Osbert wrote satirical and serious poetry, novels, short stories, criticism, and a well-known autobiographical series. The younger Sacheverell is best known for his books on art, architecture, and travel. In their time the Sitwells were the most famous literary family in England.
Sitwell was educated at home and began to write poetry when she was twenty. The first major change in her life came in 1914 when she moved to London to share a flat with her former governess, Helen Rootham. With their aristocratic background, one would hardly expect that the Sitwell children would be literary and cultural revolutionaries; however, with the appearance of her first published poem, Drowned Suns, in 1913, Edith sent shivers through the conventional literary milieu.
Her first book, The Mother and Other Poems, was published in 1915; but it was in the next few years that she really began to attract public attention.
In December of 1917 Sitwell gave her first poetry reading; it was an evening arranged by Lady Sybil Colefax and one noteworthy guest was <reading attended by> T.S. Eliot*. The readings that followed became an important way for Sitwell to establish her reputation; much of her early poetry owes its musical nature to the presupposition that it would be read aloud.
Between the years of 1916 and 1921, Sitwell edited an annual anthology of new verse, Wheels. Sitwell selected poetry for these anthologies that was both self-consciously modern in style and contemptuous of the rural lifelessness and nostalgia she saw in the "Georgian” poets.
This early poetry was strongly influenced by <influenced by> Yeats* and T.S. Eliot. The works from this time, such as Clowns' Houses (1918), Bucolic Comedies (1923), and The Sleeping Beauty (1924), revealed the visual and musical qualities of her writing; further, she created a world of beauty, childhood symbols, and unfamiliar images. In hindsight, the decade of the 1920s was the period of her greatest creativity.
With the poem Façade in 1922, Sitwell continued to emphasize the value of sound in her poetry; in fact, in addition to its lyrical quality, Façade was also her most controversial poem to date. It was accompanied by the music of <collaborated with> Walton* and was given a stormy public reading in London.
By the end of the 1920s, Sitwell’s style changed. In Gold Coast Customs (1929), Sitwell created a poem that had harsher and more sorrowful imagery. This poem was her vision of the horror and hollowness of contemporary life; while it echoed much of Eliot’s work, it also served as an early indication of her religious conversion.
If the 1920s represented a period of great poetic advance and public acclaim, the next decade was one of relative silence and personal loss. She devoted most of her energy to caring for Rootham, who was seriously ill and would never recover. It was during this period that Sitwell wrote some of her most famous prose and religious works: Alexander Pope (1930), Bath (1932), The English Eccentrics (1933), I Live Under a Black Sun (1937), A Poet's Notebook (1943), and A Notebook on William Shakespeare (1948). In addition to her personal pain, her work at this time reflected the fear and sadness the world felt over World War II.
She combined this sorrow with her personal religious evolution. In her poem “Still Falls the Rain” she combines imagery of the bombing of London during the Blitz in 1940 and Christ's Crucifixion. Even more stunning were her "Three Poems of the Atomic Age," all inspired by eyewitness descriptions of the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
She combined a physical description of the bombing with a spiritual exploration of the consequences. For Sitwell, one way to overcome the social and moral wasteland she saw around her was to embrace the Catholic Church. She officially converted to Catholicism in August 1955. She asked authors Evelyn Waugh and Roy Campbell to be her sponsors. In his diary Waugh noted that she appeared on the day of her reception "swathed in black like a 16th century infanta."
Always a candid eccentric, she continued her work in the 1950s: on a visit to the United Stated she revealed that her most serious objection to certain Beat poets was that they smelled bad. During a 1953 visit to Hollywood she completed the film script for her 1946 book A Fanfare for Elizabeth. The film, to be directed by George Cukor, was never produced.
Though she was unrecognized during her earlier years, Sitwell was honored at the end of her life. In 1951 she received an honorary D. Litt. from Oxford and in 1954 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the Queen. She received the last rites of the church before her death in London on December 11, 1964.
ASSESSMENT: Initially, Edith Sitwell was noted more for her eccentric style than her literary talent; however, in the years following WWII she became known as a formidable Modernist poet. Her poetry communicates her strong sense of feminism and her fondness for nature. The controversy that surrounded her 1922 poem Façade acted to overshadow much of her life.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Edith Sitwell, British Modernist poet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
“Edith Sitwell: A Nearly Forgotten Poetess.” July 12, 2003
http://165.29.91.7/classes/humanities/britlit/97-98/sitwell/Sitwell.htm
Martin, Robert K., “Edith Sitwell.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 20: British Poets, 1914-1945. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Donald E. Stanford, Louisiana State University. The Gale Group, 1983. pp. 335-346.
Pearce, Joseph. “Edith Sitwell: Modernity and Tradition.” July 12, 2003
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0113.html
Sitwell, Edith. "Edith Sitwell" and "Aubade." The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry . Ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair. London : W.W. Norton & Company, 1988. 447-454.
Encyclopedia Britannica