Lifting the lid on a box in the attic marked ‘Poetry Books’ (what else) this week, I found a surprise: a small, loose-leaf pamphlet of the poems of Edith Sitwell, made by the poet Leo Boix, whose Ballad of a Happy Immigrant was published by Chatto & Windus this year.
It didn’t seem to be a commercial publication, and I had no memory of buying it, so I got in touch with Leo, who kindly explained that it had been produced as part of a project with the artist Pablo Bronstein for the Frieze Art Fair in 2007. He added that he had been a fan of Sitwell’s ‘unusual voice’ ever since coming across her in a second-hand bookshop in Argentina. The briefest of the poems included — from her Façade (1922) sequence, famously set to music by William Walton — shows her at her lyrical best, interlacing clear chime, swinging rhythm and angular imagery (here reflecting the Art Deco fashion for Chinese landscape painting):
Bells of gray crystal
Break on each bough —
The swans’ breath will mist all
The cold airs now.
Like tall pagodas
Two people go,
Trail their long codas
Of talk through the snow.
Lonely are these
And lonely am I...
The clouds, gray Chinese geese
Sleek through the sky.
Reading these carefully chosen pieces took me back to a Guardian article that I wrote about a reprint of Sitwell’s Collected Poems in 2006. After summarising Sitwell’s highly synaesthetic, sound-led theory of poetry — which cites Henri Poincaré on how ‘the accident of a rhyme can call forth a system’; ‘to this I would add,’ she adds, ‘— sometimes a planetary system’ — I discussed the results (prompting the memorable illustration by Clifford Harper, above):
Too often, Sitwell’s early poetry follows the accident of a rhyme onto a planet incapable of supporting life. So, a ‘Bishop’ appears ‘Eating his ketchup’, as no one does on its own (a bishop in a nonsense poem ought at least to have it on a slice of host).
Sometimes, the method makes for better madness: ‘Thetis wrote a treatise noting wheat is silver like the sea.’ But, when it misses wit, the best of Sitwell's brittle lyricism is an old-fashioned plangency. Beneath the silliness lies a melancholy that emerges in her more controlled couplets. ‘Popular Song’ begins jauntily enough, ‘Lily O'Grady / Silly and shady’, but ends — finely — ‘And shade is on the brightest wing, / And dust forbids the bird to sing.’
Sympathy with silly, shady or simply lonely ladies is a notable emotional source for these early mock-nursery rhymes and their Modernist antagonism to Victorian mores. But as Sitwell became a less marginal figure, she developed — like her contemporary TS Eliot — an openly religious concern with dusty Mankind. As she did so, her weakness as a nonsense poet — the desire for profundity — became something like a strength.
Gold Coast Customs (1929), which concludes the first half of Collected Poems, reads too much like a doggerel version of Eliot’s The Hollow Men (‘souls, dirty paper, are blown / In the hour before dawn, through this long hell of stone’). ‘Later Poetry’, however, yields one of Sitwell’s most resonant and original pieces: ‘Still falls the Rain — / Dark as the world of man, black as our loss — / Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails / Upon the Cross.’
A poem about ‘The Raids, 1940’, ‘Still Falls the Rain’ carries off full-blown cosmic melodrama with a straight face. Under the pressure of real events, Sitwell’s nerve holds between rhymes to say what she means — just as her nerve held when, reciting the poem in London, a doodlebug was heard overhead. It is said that Margaret Thatcher modelled her public speaking voice on a recording of this descendant of the Plantagenets and Macbeths.
Collected Poems continues erratic and under-edited to the end. A judicious selection would draw out two later voices: dream-like lyric simplicity and apocalyptic intensity. A poet who could come up with the playful, haunting couplet, ‘The wind in his grey knight’s armour — / The wind in his grey night armour,’ deserves some sort of reprieve from the history of publicity.
You can read the whole review here. Some further thoughts I would add now:
* The 2006 edition of the Collected Poems by ‘Duckworth Overlook’ seems to exist thanks to a copyright loophole allowing for the facsimile reprint of a U.S. edition. Sitwell will not otherwise be out of copyright in the U.K. until 2034 — will we see a Selected Poems before then? (On a draft proof of the review, I see the Guardian editor prophetically suggested the concluding line: ‘don’t expect to see one soon’.)
* Sitwell’s championing of modernist poetry by women was consistent and important. She wrote an introduction for a translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations by her friend and former governess Helen Rootham, and promoted Gertrude Stein when she lectured in England. Later, she befriended both Lynette Roberts and Rosemary Tonks, whose brilliance and potential was — to simplify their lives, but also to speak plainly about their experience — crushed by the misogyny of British literary culture in the mid-century (Tonks: ‘They just smash and smash my poetry’). In return, Roberts spoke up for Sitwell in Poetry London (May 1950), when she rebuked Robert Graves for saying that ‘[Sitwell’s] chief message, if she may be said to have one, is the endless, minute triviality of adult life’:
Her later work has shewn much depth and breadth of vision. And surely only a woman of courage would have experimented as she has, and stood up to the ridicule only if she were confident and sure of her direction. At a time of poetic poverty, we need her rich mind […]
* The resonance of ‘Still Falls the Rain’ as a poem of the 1940s becomes especially apparent when heard in the context of this generation’s ‘apocalyptic’ aesthetic, as surveyed by James Keery’s rich anthology Apocalypse (Carcanet, 2020), which includes ‘Sill Falls…’ in its alternative history of sonorous, symbolic modernism running from Roberts, Dylan Thomas and W.S. Graham to Tonks, Sylvia Plath and Geoffrey Hill. Also powerfully in this vein are these lines (which Sitwell said came to her in a dream) from ‘Three Poems of the Atomic Age’:
There was great lightning
In flashes coming to us over the floor:
The Whiteness of the Bread —
The Whiteness of the Dead —
The Whiteness of the Claw —
All this coming to us in flashes through the open door.
The slacker rhythm of real speech in the last line is not one that Sitwell always caught, or sought, but here it gives her vision the quality of haunting, first-hand testimony.
* As my 2006 review notes, the critic F.R. Leavis famously dismissed ‘the Sitwells’ (that is, Edith and her brothers, Osbert and Sachervell) as belonging ‘to the history of publicity rather than of poetry’. But Sitwell may laugh last: a recent Guardian story about the upcoming auction of her family library begins by reminding the world that she considered Leavis (who?) a ‘tiresome, whining, pettifogging little pipsqueak’.