Edith Sitwell

Poet, Author

1887 – 1964

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Who was Edith Sitwell?

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE was a British poet and critic, eldest of the three literary Sitwells.

Like her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, Edith reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents, and lived for much of her life with her governess. A lifelong spinster, she became passionately attached to the homosexual Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was unfailingly generous and helpful.

Sitwell published poetry continuously from 1913, some of it abstract and set to music. With her dramatic style and exotic costumes, she was sometimes labelled a poseur, but her work was also praised for its solid technique and painstaking craftsmanship.

Famous Quotes:

  • Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
  • The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
  • I'm not the man to balk at a low smell, I not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.
  • I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty. But I am too busy thinking about myself.
  • Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.
  • Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
  • My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
  • I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it.
  • Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
  • 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.

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Born
Sep 7, 1887
Scarborough, North Yorkshire
Also known as
  • Sitwell, Edith
Siblings
Religion
  • Catholicism
Nationality
  • England
  • United Kingdom
Profession
Lived in
  • Keat's Grove, South End Green
Died
Dec 9, 1964
London

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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"Edith Sitwell." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/edith_sitwell>.

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