Edith Sitwell

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Roger Fry : Portrait by Edith Sitwell, oil on canvas, 1915

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE (born September 7, 1887 in Scarborough , † December 9, 1964 in London ) was an English poet.

Life

Edith Sitwell came from an aristocratic but eccentric family in Yorkshire: her parents were Sir George Sitwell , 4th Baronet of Renishaw Hall and Lady Ida Emily Augusta Denison, daughter of the Earl of Londesborough and granddaughter of Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort .

John Singer Sargent : left to right Edith, Sir George, Lady Ida, Dingverell and Osbert, oil on canvas, circa 1900

She later stated that she was descended from the Plantagenets . She had two younger brothers, Osbert and Sachverell Sitwell , who had successful literary careers themselves and who worked with Edith for a long time. Edith's relationship with her parents was very tense, especially with her father, who had her stretched in a metal frame (a kind of "iron maiden") to "cure" a curvature of the spine; Edith called the device a "steel Bastille". In her autobiography, she later stated that her parents were always strangers to her. At the age of 25 Sitwell moved from Yorkshire to London with her governess Helen Rootham .

Her first poem, The Downed Suns , was published in the Daily Mirror in 1913 , The Mother and Other Poems appeared in 1915, and between 1916 and 1921 she wrote Wheels , an anthology she worked on with her brothers; the siblings formed a kind of poets' club called "The Sitwells". In 1929, The Gold Coast Customs , a poem by Edith, was published in which she describes the artificiality of human behavior and the inhumanity hidden beneath the civilized surface. The poem is shaped by the musical rhythm of tom-tom and jazz and shows the young poet's considerable craftsmanship. Sitwell experimented with the musical qualities of language in the 20s (she herself called her poems patterns in sound ). The rhythmic dimensions of language, the possibilities of rhyme, alliteration and assonance - which she calls “color” - were used extensively by Sitwell in her joy of experimentation.

She joined modern British poetry and soon became one of its most important exponents, leaving behind the conservatism of the classical poets of the day, who in her eyes were merely backward-looking. In doing so, she appeared emphatically self-confident and with her angular face reminded of Queen Elizabeth I, she was also very tall, but above all she caused a sensation with her clothes, as she often wore brocade or silk robes, golden turbans and lots of rings - her jewelry is now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her apartment became a meeting place for young authors whose friendship she sought and supported: this included Dylan Thomas , Aldous Huxley and Denton Welch ; she also made sure that after the death of Wilfred Owen his work was published.

Known and controversial

Her unusual appearance provoked almost more criticism than her poetry, so that she was always exposed to the attacks of people like Geoffrey Grigson , FR Leavis and others, whom she countered with passion. Even when she was already dying in late 1964, critic Julian Symons accused her of exploiting the feelings of others for her own poetic advantage. Sitwell met her opponents mostly with contempt; After Noël Coward portrayed the Sitwells in a less advantageous literary way in 1922, she stubbornly refused to speak to him until her 70th birthday, that is for 35 years, before they were reconciled at their birthday party.

Sitwell examined the relationship between poetry and music, which she described in 1923 in Façade , a series of abstract poems that were then set to music by William Walton . The play was performed in such a way that the speaker stood behind a curtain on which a face was depicted, whose mouth formed a hole in the curtain, through which the speaker recited the text with the help of a megaphone. The public viewed such appearances either with amusement or with violent tumult, but they also received positive reactions from the critics.

Later work

Roger Fry: Edith Sitwell, oil on canvas, 1918

After spending some time in Paris in the 1930s, she and her brother Osbert moved back to Renshaw after the Second World War. There she sewed clothes for her friends who served in the army, among them Alec Guinness , who received a pair of socks from her. During this time she continued to write poems, which she made better known again after something had been forgotten. A good recording found Street Songs (1942), The Song of the Cold (1945) and The Shadow of Cain (1947). Her best-known poem is Still Falls the Rain , which describes the German air raids and was set to music by Benjamin Britten . In 1948 Sitwell traveled with her brothers to the United States, where she read her poems and loved to perform Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene (according to an anecdote, several men had to be carried out of the hall after such a performance in 1950).

She wrote two books on Queen Elizabeth I: Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) and The Queens and the Hive (1962). Even if she flirted with the fact that she only wrote for money, these works became a great literary success, as did English Eccentrics (1933) and Victoria of England (1936). Her only novel, I Live under a Black Sun , based on the life story of Jonathan Swift , was published in 1937.

In 1949 she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1954 she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and thus raised to the nobility . In 1955 she converted to the Catholic faith. In old age she used a wheelchair, her last reading took place in 1962. She died of heart failure in 1964, shortly after completing her autobiography Taken Care Of, at the age of 77 in the London borough of Hampstead.

Works

Volumes of poetry

  • Clowns' Houses (= Initiates. A Series of Poetry by Proved Hands. 5). Blackwell, Oxford 1918.
  • Rustic Elegies. Duckworth, London 1927.
  • Gold Coast Customs. Duckworth, London 1929.
  • The Song of the Cold. Macmillan, London 1945.
  • Façade, and Other Poems 1920-1935. Macmillan, London 1950.
  • Gardeners and Astronomers. Macmillan, London 1953.
  • Collected poems. Macmillan, London 1957.
  • The Outcasts. Macmillan, London 1962.

Other works

  • Alexander Pope. Faber & Faber, London 1930.
  • The English Eccentrics. Faber & Faber, London 1933, (In German: Englische Ezentriker. A gallery of most remarkable and remarkable ladies and gentlemen. Wagenbach, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-8031-3538-9 ).
  • Victoria of England. Faber & Faber, London 1936, (In German: Victoria von England. Krüger, Berlin 1936).
  • I Live under a Black Sun. A novel. Victor Gollancz, London 1937, (In German: I live under a black sun. Roman. Schwann, Düsseldorf 1950).
  • Fanfare for Elizabeth. Macmillan, London 1946, (biography of Elizabeth I).
  • The Queens and the Hive. Macmillan, London 1962, (biography of Elizabeth I).
  • Taken Care Of. To Autobiography. Hutchinson, London 1965, (In German: My eccentric life. Autobiography. Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-627-10008-5 ).

literature

  • Richard Fifoot: A Bibliography of Edith, Osbert and Dingverell Sitwell (= The Soho Bibliographies. 11, ZDB -ID 1078729-X ). 2nd edition, revised. Hart-Davis, London 1971, ISBN 0-246-64022-7 .
  • James D. Brophy: Edith Sitwell. The Symbolist Order. Southern Illinois University Press et al., Carbondale IL et al. 1968.
  • Marianne Moore : Edith Sitwell, Virtuoso. In: A Marianne Moore Reader. Viking Press, New York NY 1965, pp. 210-215.
  • Elizabeth Salter: The Last Years of a Rebel. A Memoir of Edith Sitwell. Mifflin, Boston MA 1967.
  • Victoria Glendinning : Edith Sitwell. A Unicorn Among Lions. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1981, ISBN 0-297-77801-3 .
  • Tanja Kohl: The Aesthetics of Early Modernism using the example of Osbert Sitwell (= contributions from English and American studies. 14). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2005, ISBN 3-631-53076-5 (also: Bonn, University, dissertation, 2004).
  • Veronika Peters : The lady behind the curtain . Wunderraum-Verlag, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-336-54808-8

Radio feature

Web links

Commons : Edith Sitwell  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Honorary Members: Edith Sitwell. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 22, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Sitwell, Edith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sitwell, Edith Louisa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 7, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Scarborough
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 1964
Place of death London