Edith Sitwell: The Poet Who Made Herself a Monument
In the early 1920s a London audience sat in front of a painted curtain while a voice, amplified through a megaphone poking out of a hole in the canvas, recited abstract verse to music. The poet was invisible by design. The reaction was bemusement, and *Façade* — words by Edith Sitwell, music by the young William Walton — became the most notorious experiment in English poetry between the wars. She was thirty-five, six feet tall, dressed like a Plantagenet, and had spent her entire childhood being told she was a disappointment.
Renishaw
Edith Sitwell was born on 7 September 1887 in Scarborough, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, the eldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet — an expert on genealogy and landscape gardening — and Lady Ida Emily Augusta Denison. Her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, both later writers, arrived in 1892 and 1897.
She described the childhood as extremely unhappy, and the details bear her out. Her mother was subject to terrible rages; her father was remote and, suspecting a spinal deformity in his daughter, subjected her to a "cure" that involved locking her into an iron frame. She wrote later that her parents had always been strangers to her. Her real upbringing came from Helen Rootham, who arrived as her governess in 1903 and remained the central relationship of her life.
Escape
The first poem, "The Drowned Suns," appeared in the *Daily Mirror* in 1913. The following year, aged twenty-six, Sitwell left the family for a modest flat in Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater, taking Rootham with her. It was an unremarkable address and it became a headquarters.
From 1916 to 1921 she edited *Wheels*, an annual anthology produced with her brothers, which set the three of them up as a self-consciously modern faction — "the Sitwells," a brand as much as a family. They were young, aristocratic, hostile to Georgian pastoral, and extremely good at being talked about.
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*Façade* (1922) was the experiment that defined her. The poems were built not for meaning but for sound: rhythm, alliteration and vowel colour handled as a composer handles notes, then set against Walton's music and delivered anonymously through a megaphone. The public did not know what to do with it. Time has been kinder, and it survives as one of the few genuinely avant-garde works produced in England in the 1920s.
*Gold Coast Customs* (1929) was the harder, better book: tom-tom and jazz rhythms driving a poem about the barbarism underneath civilised artifice. It demonstrated that the sound experiments were not a party trick but a technique she could turn on serious material.
The Turbans and the Enemies
She never married. Around 1914 she was attached to the Chilean painter Álvaro de Guevara, described by those who knew him as violent, unstable and addicted to opium; in the late 1920s she was in love, unrequitedly, with Siegfried Sassoon; and from 1927 she sustained a thirty-year devotion to the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, who took her money and her attention and kept her hopes suspended.
Six feet tall and angular, she dressed in brocade and velvet, gold turbans and heavy rings — jewellery now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. The costume invited attack and she returned fire with relish. F. R. Leavis she dismissed as "a tiresome, whining, pettyfogging little pipsqueak." Geoffrey Grigson called her "the Old Jane" in *New Verse*; Noël Coward satirised the siblings as "the Swiss Family Whittlebot" in 1923, though he and Sitwell eventually made peace. Almost alone among established writers, Sassoon defended her in 1922: "Aubrey Beardsley has triumphed over all the fat-heads of his day. Miss Sitwell will do the same." She never forgot it, telling him he was "the only person who has ever done anything at all for my poetry."
She wrote prose, she said, simply for money, and did it well: *Alexander Pope* (1930), *English Eccentrics* (1933), *Victoria of England* (1936), the Elizabeth I books *Fanfare for Elizabeth* (1946) and *The Queens and the Hive* (1962), and one novel, *I Live Under a Black Sun* (1937), drawn from the life of Swift. Her flat was a clearing house for the young: she mentored Dylan Thomas and Denton Welch, and helped get Wilfred Owen's posthumous poems into print.
The War Poems
The Second World War made her a major poet. Writing by oil lamp at Renishaw Hall, she produced *Street Songs* (1942), *The Song of the Cold* (1945) and *The Shadow of Cain* (1947). "Still Falls the Rain," on the London Blitz, is her best-known poem and was later set by Benjamin Britten. Britannica's judgement marks the change precisely: an English poet who "first gained fame for her stylistic artifices but who emerged during World War II as a poet of emotional depth and profoundly human concerns."
Why Edith Is Called a Genius
The case rests on ear rather than intellect. Sitwell's distinctive ability was to treat English as a sonic medium — to hear a line the way a composer hears a phrase, and to build poems whose logic is rhythmic and tonal before it is semantic. *Façade* is the pure demonstration; *Gold Coast Customs* shows the same equipment applied to moral argument. Critics who dislike everything else about her have generally conceded her solid technique and painstaking craftsmanship, and the war poems earned Britannica's verdict that she reached genuine emotional depth. The establishment agreed in the end: DBE in 1954, and in 1963 the first woman ever made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
The counter-case is that she was a superb self-promoter whose reputation has shrunk since her death. Grigson and Leavis thought her work empty noise dressed in a turban, and the charge that the effects are deliberately provocative rather than felt has stuck to *Façade* in particular. She wrote no criticism of lasting weight, founded no school, and is now read mainly for two or three poems. It is also fair to say that "genius" attached to her partly through performance — the height, the rings, the feuds — and that she cultivated it. The defensible verdict is that she was a genuine technical innovator in English prosody who happened also to be a great theatrical personality, and that the second has done considerable damage to the reception of the first.
Legacy
She converted to Roman Catholicism in August 1955, asking Evelyn Waugh to stand as her godfather. Joint disease put her in a wheelchair from about 1957; her last poetry reading was in 1962. She died at St Thomas' Hospital, Lambeth, on 9 December 1964, aged seventy-seven, and is buried at Weedon Lois in Northamptonshire. Her papers are at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas and a blue plaque marks her Hampstead flat. What survives most reliably is the work she did for other people's writing — Thomas, Welch, Owen — and the proof, delivered by a woman her father tried to straighten in an iron frame, that English verse could be built out of pure sound and still mean something.
Achievements
- Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire — 1954
- Notable work: Façade
