Background
Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough on September 7, 1887, into a family of landed gentry. Her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, both younger, also became celebrated writers.
Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough on September 7, 1887, into a family of landed gentry. Her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, both younger, also became celebrated writers.
She was privately educated on the family estate at Renishaw until she entered the literary circles of London shortly before the beginning of World War I.
Her first volume, The Mother and Other Poems, was published in 1915, and the following year she began to edit an annual anthology, Wheels, which set out to repudiate the comfortable, familiar, English sentimentalities of the Georgian poets. Its bizarre, satirical, self-conscious verse anticipated that judgment of the contemporary scene that was to be perfectly articulated shortly thereafter by T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland. Edith Sitwell was thus in the vanguard of the movement that radically changed English poetry at the end of World War I. Edith Sitwell's early poems, which intermingle startling images of the demonic, the mechanical, and the natural world and employ as their favorite figure the clown or the metaphor of the harlequinade, present an elaborately distorted, nonnaturalistic picture of a world gone mad. Yet they also show evidence of the richness of color and sensuality to which the poet had responded as a rather solitary child and that influenced her poetry throughout her life. They also exhibit an extraordinary sense of rhythm which, with other experiments in sound, proved to be Edith Sitwell's most marked and controversial gift to contemporary poetry. The manner in which Edith Sitwell chose to present her despair at the emptiness and hypocrisy of a world without spirit was so genuinely avant-garde that in 1923 the audience at the first public theatrical presentation of the lyrics collected under the title Façade thought itself the victim of hypocrisy and her poetry the empty hoax. The apparently cynical, amoral grotesquerie of her early poems may have been less than entirely satisfactory to the maturing Edith Sitwell herself. By the time she published Gold Coast Customs in 1929, the pervasive sense of horror-the stifling awareness of the death of the living-was not created within the confined imagery of the artificial commedia dell'arte but spread through a broad anthropological landscape. There are images of vast distance, of journeys, of the sea, and of the visions and barbarities of ancient cultures. Edith Sitwell wrote little poetry in the 1930s. She exercised herself in the preparation of a number of anthologies and in prose. A critical biography, Alexander Pope, was published in 1930. In 1937 she published her only novel, I Live under a Black Sun; in 1943, A Poet's Notebook. By the time of World War II she had become not merely a literary celebrity but a doyenne of letters whose sponsorship was eagerly sought by younger poets. As a leader in the literary haut monde, she published Street Songs in 1942 and The Canticle of the Rose: Poems 1917-1949 in 1949. She also became "respectable" and respected. In the 1950s she traveled widely, reading and lecturing to admiring audiences both in England and in the United States. She continued to write and to edit; she left ready for publication after her death, in London on December 9, 1964, an autobiography, Taken Care Of.
Although her poetic vision remained as much pagan as Christian, Edith Sitwell became a Roman Catholic in 1955.
She never married, but became passionately attached to the gay Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was unfailingly generous and helpful.