Abstract
Throughout Edith Sitwell’s poetic career, one specific factor was always in the foreground in her works, that is, the experimental use of sound. Especially in her earlier period, employing rhythm as an experimental arrangement of sounds dominated the bulk of her poems. Sitwell prioritised this technical element over thematic components, and thus developed an inventive approach to the art of poetry in the early twentieth century. Her famous poetry collection, Façade (1922) can be considered one of the most distinguished examples of her experimental manner, consisting of several abstract poems which were compiled for dramatic performance and for William Walton’s music. With Walton’s contributions, Sitwell combined the elements of music and poetry in Façade, and she formed a new artistic domain where she could express and improve her poetic style by working on the use of sound and rhythm. The reason for her emphasis on the role of rhythm in poetry was not only its significance as a technical attribute but also its functioning as a representative of the century’s spirit. For Sitwell, the rhythm of the twentieth century must not be the rhythm of the eighteenth or the nineteenth centuries, on the contrary, it should reflect the soul of its era. Accordingly, Sitwell advocated that poetry should be compatible with the tone of the period in which it is produced. Therefore, the poems in the collection were designed to be as unsteady, tumultuous, and complex as the era they belonged to, and this composition was achieved through her experimental style. In this respect, the primary aim of this article is to discuss Sitwell’s technical and stylistic experiments with sound in her Façade poems and examine her perception of artistic creation in the twentieth century.
Highlights
As a modernist avant-garde poet and a literary critic, Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell (1887-1964) was one of the most extraordinary and controversial personas of the twentieth century, mostly due to “[...] her highly stylised appearance, aristocratic background and use of acidic quips to batter her critics rather than her poetic achievements” (Harris, 2015, p. 1)
In “Some Notes on My Own Poetry,” the introduction of her The Collected Poems, Sitwell elucidates her particular interest in experimental poetry in terms of technique by asserting that, “[a]t the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us” (1957, p. xv)
Despite having been inspired by the traditional English poetry, the Romantics in particular, such as Shelley and Blake, Sitwell managed to disengage her art from her predecessors and her Georgian contemporaries with regards to style, and headed for more experimental methods, which were considered, as Lehmann explicates, unfamiliar by the public: The weight of the English tradition since the Romantic revival has led the public to expect from its poets, especially in their shorter works, poems which transmute into imaginative substance particular experiences and emotions “recollected in tranquillity.” [...] There are almost no such poems in Edith Sitwell’s oeuvre
Summary
As a modernist avant-garde poet and a literary critic, Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell (1887-1964) was one of the most extraordinary and controversial personas of the twentieth century, mostly due to “[...] her highly stylised appearance, aristocratic background and use of acidic quips to batter her critics rather than her poetic achievements” (Harris, 2015, p. 1). Her efforts to challenge the traditional forms of poetry in her works proved Sitwell’s literary success and gained her a considerable appreciation by the literary figures of the time In her lifetime, Sitwell wrote a variety of poems in terms of theme and concern. Instead of following the footsteps of the Romantics and conforming to the conventional public appetite, Sitwell distanced the focus of her art from “particular experiences and emotions,” and turned it towards experimenting with the technical aspects of poetry Perhaps her poetry collection, Façade (1922) is one of the most prominent examples for her experimental style in the early twentieth century, consisting of several abstract poems which were compiled for William Walton’s music, and for dramatic performance. In this sense, provide an enquiry into Sitwell’s idiosyncratic approach to poetry: sound and rhythm of the words being the ultimate medium to carry the gist of a work of art
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