Marvellous Edith
I never really 'got' Edith Sitwell until this week, when, casting around for women poets whose work I could use for my Modern British Poetry course alongside Charlotte Mew and long-time favourite Stevie Smith, I remembered Sitwell's odd verse scripts in Facade (1922, that important year in literary modernism) and the intelligent enquiry into her writing Deryn Rees-Jones has in her Essays on Modern Women Poets ('Consorting with Angels'). Although she's more often a kind of slightly ridiculous post-script in the history-of-poetry books today, she dominated the scene for decades. Her style has affinities with the surrealists, though she would have hated you to say so, and later parallels with concepts of theoretical play and subversion, the grotesque, the carnivalesque, are undoubtedly in evidence. You can find lengthy sound excerpts from 'Facade' on YouTube, with Sitwell herself reading many of the pieces to the odd chamber music compositions of William Walton. But nothing would have replaced being there at an actual performance, a literal facade constructed by screens and the bizarre medium of the 'sengerphone' (a sort of large cardboard megaphone) through which a gowned and turbanned Sitwell would recite.
Was it that her background was so aristocratic that she assumed an authority which she failed to back up with solid, serious text; or was she trying for a different sort of poetic performance altogether? She declared in a 1925 interview for Vogue that:
'women's poems should above all things, be eloquent as a peacock, and that there should be a fantastic element, a certain strangeness to their beauty.'
This is arguably what she strove for herself, though it didn't prevent her writing seriously when she felt the need (1940's 'Still Falls the Rain').
This week it's the 'Thirties Poets' proper on the seminar menu - the serious political endeavors of Auden and his devotees. Reading around the literary context I was delighted to read Sitwell's magnificently arrogant response to a request that she 'submit' some poems to barely-established magazine 'The New Coterie'
Sir,
I am requested by Miss Edith Sitwell to return the enclosed communication, which was doubtless sent to her by mistake. Writers of Miss Sitwell's standing do not 'submit' their works for approval...Miss Sitwell asks me to assure you that she does not suspect you of deliberate bad manners; your mistake is possibly the result of lack of experience in dealing with writers of eminence.
Yours faithfully,
M. Grogan (for Miss Sitwell)
The letter was in fact published at the time (1935) in order to further the activities of what the politically fervent (and male) poets called 'Jane Baiting'. But all things considered, I'm not sure it isn't Edith Sitwell who has the upper hand - her tone is hilarious but so perhaps was the circular letter which provoked it. And I've always been a bit amused by that word 'submission' when it comes to sending poems off for someone else's judgement. So Jane, Jane, tall as a crane (as 'Aubade' begins), display your peacock feathers and stand proud.
Was it that her background was so aristocratic that she assumed an authority which she failed to back up with solid, serious text; or was she trying for a different sort of poetic performance altogether? She declared in a 1925 interview for Vogue that:
'women's poems should above all things, be eloquent as a peacock, and that there should be a fantastic element, a certain strangeness to their beauty.'
This is arguably what she strove for herself, though it didn't prevent her writing seriously when she felt the need (1940's 'Still Falls the Rain').
This week it's the 'Thirties Poets' proper on the seminar menu - the serious political endeavors of Auden and his devotees. Reading around the literary context I was delighted to read Sitwell's magnificently arrogant response to a request that she 'submit' some poems to barely-established magazine 'The New Coterie'
Sir,
I am requested by Miss Edith Sitwell to return the enclosed communication, which was doubtless sent to her by mistake. Writers of Miss Sitwell's standing do not 'submit' their works for approval...Miss Sitwell asks me to assure you that she does not suspect you of deliberate bad manners; your mistake is possibly the result of lack of experience in dealing with writers of eminence.
Yours faithfully,
M. Grogan (for Miss Sitwell)
The letter was in fact published at the time (1935) in order to further the activities of what the politically fervent (and male) poets called 'Jane Baiting'. But all things considered, I'm not sure it isn't Edith Sitwell who has the upper hand - her tone is hilarious but so perhaps was the circular letter which provoked it. And I've always been a bit amused by that word 'submission' when it comes to sending poems off for someone else's judgement. So Jane, Jane, tall as a crane (as 'Aubade' begins), display your peacock feathers and stand proud.
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