Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell's poetry and prose destroy me. Really captivating French literature has the same effect on me. All of my insecurities break apart, and I realize that the best art perfects an iteration of self and shows from the point of view of that self what the world is like, not only to the senses, but to that fine, wonderful producer of distortions, the imagination.

Language, for Sitwell, makes music. In her magician's grasp, the English language becomes a fresh, fun and very musical medium. Particularly in her early poetry, Bucolic Comedies and Façade, a harsh music of alliteration, daring rhymes, colliding, frictional consonants and vowel sounds of various lengths comes forth to divide her fans from her foes.

Another thing I noticed and continue to love about her work is the experimental nature of her imagery:

     The wooden chalets of the cloud
     Hang down their dull blunt ropes to shroud
     Red crystal bells upon each bough
     ("Early Spring", Bucolic Comedies)

or

     See the tall black Aga on the sofa in the alga mope, his
     Bell-rope
     Moustache (clear as a great bell !)
     Waves in eighteen-eighty
     Bustles
     Come
     Late with tambourines of
     Rustling
     Foam
     ("Something Lies Beyond the Scene", Façade).

Her similes and metaphors are not neatly appropriate like realism in painting, but are instead fantastic, highly personal stabs at writing in a new way. Sitwell was conscious of the synesthesia of our daily experiences. Check her work out. You won't be bored with it.

This brief essay concludes with depictions of the poet by a few different artists:

     Depiction 1 by Wyndham Lewis
     Depiction 2 by Alvaro Guevara
     Depiction 3 by Roger Eliot Fry
     Depiction 4 by David Jacobson