I am going to get back into my Daily Book Excerpt thing that I haven’t done in over a year, for various reasons. The main one being my inability to read last year, and outside events that impacted my desire to write, or blog, or anything else. When I left off, I was on my poetry shelf, so I will pick up from there. If I keep going, I would (of course, because I am OCD), go back and go through all the shelves again – doing posts and excerpts on all of the books in the various genres that I have read SINCE I started doing the Excerpt thing. In a way, it’s a fun cataloguing exercise, and I am the daughter of one of the great all-time cataloguers. With poetry, I have a lot of anthologies, so I was going through them, and picking out poets that I felt I had something to say about. That, to me, seems fair. So, in the case of poetry (as well as short story collections), I would do multiple excerpts from one book. This was an executive decision I made, and I will stick to it. Picking up where we left off ….
Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry
Edith Sitwell is one of those people whose name is known to me – it’s woven into the poetry-conversation, and she does command her own spot, her place seems secure – but I was not all that familiar with her work. I don’t remember her 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. I’m not a scholar. More of a casual fan, so sometimes I miss the signs.
Edith Sitwell reminds me a little bit of Martha Graham. Graham had a strict classical ballet background, 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???” Arching the pelvis, legs bent, she broke down classical ballet and found the underbelly of it, going for the mythical and sexual themes. But her background was strong and traditional, and the dancers in her troupe were known as some of the best ballet dancers in the world, in terms of technique. She pushed them in other ways. But if you didn’t have that strong background in the mainstream tradition, you 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 had come before. She is not quite modern, but also not quite traditional. She’s on the divide. The thing about her that is also interesting is that she seems quite bohemian (check out photos of her!), but she lived in a huge ancestral house, surrounded by the heavy tradition of family and riches and a long long family tree. A strange dichotomy.
She was (like so many other poets of the day) blown away by T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock. It validated her own experiments, and helped her push farther in that direction. The past was dead. Move forward into the new.
She wrote:
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.
Dame Edith didn’t pull her punches. She was inspired by Baudelaire and Mallarme (putting her in line with Oscar Wilde and his aesthetes), and wanted, above all else, to find language that was appropriate to the new modern age, its technology, its danger, the bleak catastrophe of World War I – it was an amazing time for literature. How to put it into words? The 19th century forms flat out would not do. Sitwell wrote:
The great quality of the modern masters is an explosive energy, the separating up of the molecules, exploring the possibilities of the atom.
You can feel the entire upheaval of the 20th century in that sentence. After the first atomic bombs were dropped, she wrote some incredible poems about it, the main one being “Three Poems of the Atomic Bomb”.
She would do readings of her poems that were actually elaborate performance-art pieces. People were annoyed by her, as people are often annoyed by pretentious over-seriousness. Sitwell experimented with sound and repetition, and she was also very tall (her mother had been so disappointed in what her daughter ended up looking like – Edith wasn’t really a loved child, by either parent) – so she made quite a striking impression. Perhaps the fact that she was so rich, with old OLD money – had something to do with her ability to just not give a crap, and do whatever she wanted to do. She never had to work for a living. She did her own thing. She was editor of a literary review in the years leading up to World War I. She published Wilfred Owen’s war poetry, she published poems by her brothers (also poets), and her own stuff. The Sitwells were representative of a lot of things the British found disgusting: privilege, class, money, isolation – so she had a lot going against her to be taken seriously.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
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.
That, to me, seems quite accurate.
But she was a fighter. She was a great hater. She loved attacking her attackers, and continuing on to just do whatever the hell she wanted to do. Coming from a baronial mansion in the countryside, she was determinedly avant-garde, in outlook and practice. The funniest thing is that eventually she did become part of the establishment – she was made a “Dame” of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth – and went on huge reading tours around England and America – a big crowd-pleaser.
Schmidt again writes:
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.
I am not familiar with a lot of her work, but here’s one poem I do know and like. It’s about the Battle of Britain, 1940 – when the Germans carried out bombing raids, from the air, over England. It’s also appropriate because it was just Easter.
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.”
