Born on this day.
I don’t remember Sitwell being “read” in my poetry class in college, and I don’t remember her being covered in my English or Humanities classes in high school. She doesn’t seem to be one of the “big ones” anymore, although it may just be that I have not been paying proper attention.
Edith Sitwell reminds me a little bit of Martha Graham. Graham had a strict background in classical ballet, and then veered off into “modern” dance, although it wasn’t called that at the time. For the most part it was called: “WTF is she doing???” or “Is she ALLOWED to do that??” The dancers in Graham’s troupe were some of the best ballet dancers in the world, and she pushed them in other ways. If a dancer didn’t have a strong background in the mainstream classical tradition, they wouldn’t have lasted a day with Martha Graham. Edith Sitwell has a similar reactionary attitude. Not reactionary in terms of politics, but reactionary in terms of trying to define herself against all that came before. Sitwell is interesting because she seems quite bohemian in many ways, while on the other hand she lived in a huge ancestral mansion, surrounded by the heavy tradition of family and riches, part of a long family tree. A strange dichotomy.
Edith Sitwell 1923-35 Wyndham Lewis 1882-1957 Presented by Sir Edward Beddington-Behrens 1943 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05437
Like so many other poets of her day, T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock was a game-changer.
She wanted to find language appropriate to the new modern age, its technology, danger, the bleak catastrophe of World War I. The 19th century forms flat out would not do anymore. Still, she borrowed heavily. All them Modernists did.
Her public readings were elaborate performance-art pieces. Sitwell was very tall (her mother had been disappointed in her daughter’s awkward looks) and made a striking impression. She never had to work for a living. She edited a literary review in the years leading up to World War I. She published Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. She had a lot going against her. A lot of people were very irritated by the whole Edith Sitwell thing. Many refused to take her seriously because of her vast wealth.
She was an avant-garde person living in a baronial mansion. The funniest thing is eventually she did become part of the establishment when she was made a “Dame” of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth and went on huge reading tours around England and America. Here she is meeting Marilyn Monroe! Look at Marilyn’s alert delighted posture.
(This is a very good article giving some background to this meeting, the first of many. They hit it off.)
Here’s her most famous poem, written during the Battle of Britain in 1940, as London was being bombarded by German air attacks. She was in the maelstrom of the Blitz, surrounded by horror and destruction.
Still Falls the Rain
The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn
Still falls the Rain—
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss—
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.
Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.
Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us—
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.
Still falls the Rain—
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,—those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear—
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh… the tears of the hunted hare.
Still falls the Rain—
Then— O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune—
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,—dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.
Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain—
“Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.”
There’s a lot to unpack in this poem. Since her live performances were so much a part of her art, I thought it would be interesting to share the recording of her reading “Still Falls the Rain”, in that incantatory tone, that hollow ringing tone, meant to cast a spell.
QUOTES:
Edith Sitwell:
Poetry is the deification of reality.
Whatever you say, Dame Edith!
Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell:
My parents were strangers to me from the moment of my birth.
Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets
In 1914 Edith, aged twenty-seven, descended on London … There, in 1916, while war distracted Europe, she edited Wheels, an avant-garde periodical whose aim was to startle the bourgeoisie, and more generally to prompt a reconsideration of the diction and scope of poetry. Her assault on philistinism and conservatism was implicitly revolutionary, but a revolution from the palace rather than the tenements. She had little truck with the Imagists. She was then, and she remained, a thoroughbred Bolshevik.
Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
In the 1920s, few English poets followed the lead of Eliot and Pound, and those who did made relatively little impact on their first readers. An exception to this as to many other rules was Edith Sitwell, whose highly abstract, sound-centered sequence, Facade (read to the music of her friend William Walton), scandalized its first public audience, in 1923. At about the same time, in Sitwell’s anthologies called Wheels, she was vigorously attacking poetry less experimental than her own, and she also brought to light the war poems of Wilfred Owen.
Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf, 1955:
I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her ‘a beautiful little knitter.’
Edith Sitwell:
“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.”
Michael Schmidt:
When the first atomic bomb was dropped, she became an apocalyptic poet par excellence. With “Three Poems of the Atomic Bomb,” human apocalypse unites with her religious vision. She becomes prophetic, a prophecy lacking in particulars, chilly, inhuman. Dust, sun, and wind, three elements in all her verse, come triumphantly into sway.
Randall Jarrell, letter to Robert Lowell, 1948
Edith Sitwell–a skull fattened for the slaughter.
Louis Untermeyer on Facade:
There has rarely been so brilliant an exhibition of verbal legerdemain.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Sitwell also had an elaborate notion, based in part on Mallarme but more reiterative, of the effects of particular letters and sounds. Her experiments with verbal sound and abstraction also bear comparison with those of the American writer Gertrude Stein.
Edith Sitwell:
The great quality of the modern masters is an explosive energy, the separating up of the molecules, exploring the possibilities of the atom.
Michael Schmidt:
In England reinvention took many forms, but none quite so eccentric as Edith Sitwell’s. She exerts a fascination – not the fascination of Poe, whose wild music and tragic life are part of the birth of something substantial, but the fascination of a languid social and cultural tradition coming to an end in a falling chandelier of metrical sententiousness. The surprise here is that the social type she represents survived so long, that her writing can be so funny when it least means to be, so flat when humor is her intention. She might seem to embody, more than Wilde ever did, what we now know as camp. But camp involves self-conscious projection. There is no reason to believe that the heavily ringed, heavily rouged poet ever took herself anything less than seriously.
Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell:
[I wanted to achieve] a greater expressiveness, a greater formality, and a return to rhetoric…[rejecting] the outcry for understatement, for quietness, for neutral tints in poetry.
Edith Sitwell, intro to The Canticle of the Rose:
At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.
Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell:
With the publication of Prufrock, a new era in poetry began.
Michael Schmidt:
For one who flouted convention, she surrounded herself in later years with rituals that required strict observance: a monster of whim and self-importance, she also sometimes had a magical way with words.
Edith Sitwell, intro to The Canticle of the Rose:
[My poems are] hymns of praise to the glory of life.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Her talent was offbeat and difficult to categorize, but her attempts to enliven the relations of sound, image, and sense continue to inspire avant-garde poets in England.
Edith Sitwell:
I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.
Edith Sitwell, photo by George Platt Lynes, 1937
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