I don't know or much care how Dame Edith Sitwell is ranked as a poet these days. She speaks to me, anyway. She pursued her vision with verve, and it remains infectious.
Façade came early in her career. She'd do many other great poems. But this suite with accompanying music is a terrific example of her having fun.
2 comments:
Whenever the subject of Dame Edith comes up I always delight in reading about her unfeigned eccentricity. She was definitely one of a kind, destined to be either a great genius or a half wit and aren't we glad her fate turned out to be the former.
Wikipedia says, although she never married, Sitwell fell in love numerous times with unavailable men - either married or gay one would presume. Interestingly enough, the poet Siegfried Sassoon after reading Façade compared her to someone else whose career we've discussed:
In 1922, he wrote a glowing review of Façade in the Daily Herald entitled "Too Fantastic for Fat-Heads", in which he compared Sitwell to the artist Aubrey Beardsley and declared: "Aubrey Beardsley has triumphed over all the fat-heads of his day. Miss Sitwell will do the same."
"Unfeigned" is right. Her eccentricity appears to have been spontaneous, and not a way of lording it over people. I'm sure a few geniuses have been mistaken for halfwits. And vice versa, obviously.
Does leading an artistic life require one to be romantically unfulfilled? Not necessarily, but in a lot of cases it seems to help. Ergo if she kept falling in love with men who couldn't or wouldn't really be with her, maybe that was a strategy.
That's an interesting comparison. I wouldn't have liked Dame Edith to Beardsley on my own, but it makes a certain amount of sense. They both include a lot of the exotic and fantastic in their works, as well as a little of the macabre. She lived a good deal longer than he did, and there's an interesting evolution in her poetry.
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