Edith Sitwell, one of the twentieth century’s foremost poets and a flamboyant exponent of experimentation in verse, was the oldest child of Sir George Sitwell, fourth baronet of Renishaw Park, the family seat for six hundred years. Much of the extravagant personality of Edith and her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, is readily understandable to the reader of Sir Osbert Sitwell’s memoirs of their outrageous father, Left Hand, Right Hand.
Educated in secret (as she said), Edith Sitwell first became known in 1916 as the editor of an anthology, Wheels, which stridently featured for six years her own work, that of her brothers, and other authors whose voices were to be heard frequently in the 1920’s. One of the highlights of the 1925 theater season in London was the premiere of Sitwell’s Facade, in which she chanted her early fanciful and rhythmical verse to similarly exciting musical settings provided by William Walton. For the performance Sitwell spoke through an amplifying mask behind a screen, a device to provide artificiality for the exotic occasion. The London Hall was an uproar of Sitwell’s admirers and detractors. Twenty-five years later, the work was similarly performed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but so far had modern taste and Sitwell’s reputation advanced that the last occasion was almost regal in dignity, as befitted its central performer–Sitwell had been given the accolade of Grand Dame of the Cross of the British Empire in 1954.
Her flair for self-dramatization made students of literature uneasy about the seriousness of her poetry for a long time. Standing six feet in height, she always appeared in extravagant and archaic costumes and headgear, often medieval, spangled with ostentatious rings and necklaces. “I have always had a great affinity for Queen Elizabeth [I],” she said once. “We were born on the same day of the month and about the same hour of the day.”
Although her Dadaist stunts were calculated to express her love of being flamboyant and of irritating the stuffy (“Good taste,” she claimed, “is the worst vice ever invented”), her interest in poetry was serious, as was her talent. Her keenness for verbal experimentation found a fit subject in the extraordinary Gold Coast Customs, her own version of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and one of the remarkable poems of the remarkable decade of the 1920’s.
For ten years after Gold Coast Customs Sitwell wrote little poetry, devoting herself to critical essays and nonfiction, including a biography of Alexander Pope, but mainly taking care of a friend, Helen Rootham, through her fatal illness. With the coming of World War II, Sitwell returned to poetry, still with her dazzling technical equipment but now with a rich store of traditional Christian imagery, having become a Roman Catholic in 1955. The agonies of the bombardment of London and the terror of the atomic bomb evoked from Sitwell some of the most moving poetry ever written about the cruelty of war.
Along with her delight in self-dramatization, Sitwell was renowned, from the publication of Wheels all through her life, for her championship of younger writers. Dylan Thomas is but one of the best known of the writers whose verbal experimentation she praised and championed early in their careers.