Dame Edith Sitwell

(http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/dame_edith_sitwell/biography 8-14-09)Edith Sitwell (September 7, 1887 - December 9, 1964) was a British poet and critic. Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, of aristocratic but eccentric parentage of Lord George Sitwell and ex-socialite Lady Ida Sitwell of Renishaw Hall. She would later claim that she was descended from the Plantagenets. She had two younger brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. Her relationship with her parents was stormy at best, especially when her father locked her into an iron frame to "correct" her supposed spine deformation. In her later autobiography she said that her parents had always been strangers to her. Sitwell left for London at the age of twenty-five with the governess Helen Rootham. In London she moved into a fourth-floor flat in Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater. She published her first poem The Drowned Suns in the Daily Mirror in 1913 and between 1916 and 1921 edited Wheels, an annual poetic anthology. She became a proponent and supporter of innovative trends in English poetry and opposed what she considered the conventionalism of many contemporary backward-looking poets. She was an unusual sight herself, having angular features resembling Queen Elizabeth I and being six feet (183 cm) tall, but mainly because she often dressed in an unusual manner with gowns of brocade or velvet or gold turbans with jewelled bracelets. Her flat became a meeting place for people that would later become the so-called Bloomsbury group. She was most interested by the distinction between poetry and music, a matter explored at 1923 in Façade, published in 1922, and set to music by William Walton, with many poems being most esoteric in manner. The performance of the Façade was performed behind a curtain with a hole in the mouth of a painted face and the words were recited through the hole with the aid of a megaphone. The public received the first performance with bemusement with less than favourable critiques from luminaries like Noel Coward; she would not speak with Coward for the next forty years. She reputedly also disliked D.H. Lawrence because she thought that the author had used the Renishaw Hall as a model in Lady Chatterley's Lover. She never married, but made poet Dylan Thomas her protégé. She received a Royal Society of Literature medal in 1933. During World War II, Sitwell retired to Renshaw with her brother Osbert and wrote under the light of oil lamps. She knitted clothes for their friends who served in the army. One of the beneficiaries was young Alec Guinness, who received a pair of seaboot stockings. In 1948 Sitwell toured USA with her brothers and recited her poetry in a large gold dress. She became a DBE in 1954. In 1955 she converted to Roman Catholicism. She also wrote a biography of Queen Elizabeth and afterwards called her "the old bore". In her 70's she was confined to wheelchair. Her last poetry reading was in 1962. Edith Sitwell died in 1964 at the age of 77. Biography by: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Edith Sitwell. (http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/Colbeck/writers/sitwell.htm 8-14-09)English poet, critic, and biographer, Sitwell was most successful as a writer of satirical verse or burlesque. She was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and educated privately. She and her brothers Osbert and Scheverell were likely the most famous literary family of their time.Sitwell both shocked and amused people by her writing, eccentric behavior, and dramatic Elizabethan dress. Her poetry is notable for its avoidance of outmoded metaphor and imagery, its technical dexterity, especially in the use of dance rhythms, and its ability ot communicate sensation and emotion.During World War II (1939-1945), Sitwell wrote poems about the blitz and other war issues, such as "Still Falls the Rain," which describes a London air raid.In 1954 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (13).(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Sitwell 8-14-09) Being the first child of Sir George Sitwell and Lady Ida, she was born on September 7, 1887. Edith Sitwell was the daughter of a prestigious earl, but this did not mean that she was any happier because of her aristocratic surroundings. Sitwell expressed her disassociation from her parents in her autobiography. She once complained, "My parents were strangers to me from the moment of my birth" (Ellmann 449). Sitwell's father was described as "an extreme eccentric and an impossible parent; as for her mother, she was upset by Edith's unusual features and then by her great height" (Ellmann 449). Sitwell's poetry possesses the constant themes of her strong sense of feminism and her fondness for nature including its complex cycles. Sitwell has an artistic nature that is genuinely unique, and this uniqueness has drawn many admirers to investigate what the true meaning is behind her important works. Some of her memorable works include Facade, The Canticle of the Rose, and Gold Coast Customs. Sitwell's strongest poetic influences were T.S. Eliot's Prufrock, Baudelaire, Blake, Pope, Yeats, Thomas, Stravinsky's music, and the growth of modern art. Sitwell admired T.S. Eliot's ability to "see the world with different eyes" (Ellmann 448). Within Facade, the poems were known to be abstract in that they could not be easily translated. Sitwell commented, "they [the poems] are patterns in sound...they are, too, in many cases virtuoso exercises of an extreme difficulty..." (Ellmann 448). One of the many subjects Sitwell expands on is "the growth of consciousness. Sometimes it is like that of a person who has always been blind and who, suddenly endowed with sight, must learn to see; or it is the cry of that waiting, watching world, where everything we see is a symbol of something beyond, to the consciousness that is yet buried in this earth-sleep..." (Ellmann 448). As Sitwell grew older, she often changed the general theme of her poetry to being "hymns of praise to the glory of life" (Ellmann 448). After gaining quite a name for herself by obtaining degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, she died in 1964. Her poetry in Facade is still highly acclaimed for its odd explorations of sound and image. Two of her poems, Heart and Mind and Aubade, are below along with interpretations.Related Sites: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/mbp/77.html http://www.amherst.edu/~bmhall/edith.html http://www.cyber-nation.com/victory/quotations/authors/ quotes_sitwell_dameedith.html http://www.inlink.com/~mpgpc/cmgthink9.html---------------------------------------------------------------------------Works Cited: 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. Sitwell, Edith. "Heart and Mind." The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. Ed. Phillip Larkin. New York : Oxford University Press, 1973. 217-224.