A few weeks ago I remarked that if I were to write a book on poetic craft, it would mainly consist of notes on craft from other disciplines like dance or music. I keep a file of such quotes (I guess this used to be called one’s “common-place book” but now it’s just an endlessly scrolling doc on a laptop). I went back to it today and saw that I had juxtaposed these two:
“I was heartily congratulated on my perfectly placed mishap, for Mr. B. is known to like those who fall; it indicates an energy and fearlessness that is essential to excitement.” (Toni Bentley in Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal, recounting an episode in Balanchine’s class where she stumbled)
“[William Carlos Williams] wouldn’t make so much of the great American language if he were plausible; and tractable. That’s the beauty of it; he is willing to be reckless; if you can’t be that, what’s the point of the whole thing?” (interview with Marianne Moore)
I’ve always liked high-wire acts (energy, fearlessness, recklessness) in poetry. Anyway, in response to my remark Ben Friedlander dropped the name Edith Sitwell in my comment box, and off I went to get her A Poet’s Notebook from the library. And I was well rewarded with quotes from Baudelaire, Whitman, Cocteau, Emerson …. Wait, I thought. Edith Sitwell isn’t who I thought she was. I had a vague notion of a conservative English poetess (despite the fact that I knew she had an admirer in Robert Duncan).
So, noodling around the library, I decided to look up some of her poems. And I found this in The Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse (chosen by Philip Larkin):
SIR BEELZEBUB
When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell
Where Proserpine first fell,
Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea,
(Rocking and shocking the barmaid).
Nobody comes to give him his rum but the
Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum
Enhances the chances to bless with a benison
Alfred Lord Tennyson crossing the bar laid
With cold vegetation from pale deputations
Of temperance workers (all signed In Memoriam)
Hoping with glory to trip up the Laureate’s feet,
(Moving in classical metres) …
Like Balaclava, the lava came down from the
Roof, and the sea’s blue wooden gendarmerie
Took them in charge while Beelzebub roared for his rum.
… None of them come!
How utterly bizarre. What nonsense. Naturally, I’m interested. This poem hails from a 1918 series called Façade, in which she explored unusual rhythms. (It was later set to music by William Walton.) In a tradition capacious enough for Crashaw’s baroquery, why not Sitwell?
The internet tells me her “Good taste is the worst vice ever invented” is a famous quotation, and that she was estranged from her eccentric aristocratic parents after a childhood in which she was immobilized on an iron frame supposedly to cure a spinal deformation. I suppose after being tortured by an iron frame, one would indeed be bent on smithing stranger meters.
Finally, Facades, through Walton’s music, eventually metamorphosed into a Frederick Ashton ballet in 1931.
There are some fascinating audio recordings of Edith Sitwell reading her work – worth tracking down, too. Her Collected Poems was recently reissued, and so… perhaps another revival is taking place?
Posted By: Don Share on October 4, 2007 at 2:42 pmIn a piece coming soon to Poetry, Jhumpa Lahiri recalls being told by the late Alberto de Lacerda that Dame Edith had, among other things, “fabulous hands.” I tracked down a photograph of her, and sure enough: she did!
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I’ve always loved that Moore quote too, and thanks for the delightful Sitwell poem — someone who’s only been a name to me.
Posted By: John on October 4, 2007 at 7:20 pmI’m going to go see who comes when I call for *my* syllabub.
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I believe that Jarrell quotes the same poem you quoted as an example of Sitwell’s early, comic style, which he (and other people) contrast with her later, and rather portentous, work about such subjects as the Blitz– it’s that work that earned her a reputation as “conservative,” I guess. I’ll be curious what you think of her when you’ve read more of her– I haven’t looked at her at length in a long time.
Posted By: Steve on October 4, 2007 at 7:32 pmIf there’s really a Sitwell revival, who’s next? It could be Conrad Aiken. I recommend– I really do recommend– this wonderful anthology piece from his book-length poem Senlin. If you are a fan of Madeline L’Engle– and I believe, Ange, that you are– you may find a few of the lines surprisingly familiar.
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Our friend, the Poetry Tool, has info about Edith Sitwell here; “Still Falls the Rain” will live in the English language as long as, well, anthologies of English language poems and/or war exist…
Posted By: Don Share on October 4, 2007 at 9:19 pmReport this comment
Thanks for the links, Don– I went back to look at “Still Falls the Rain,” and I (still) don’t quite participate wholeheartedly in your admiration: the first stanza carries me, certainly, but by the end? You could argue that a subject this big needs all the stops pulled out on the organ, that any more controlled or more subtle ending to a poem on this subject would ring false to the extremity of the experience– but there’s a religiosity (yes, “religiosity” is pejorative– “religious feeling” is the neutral term) that scuttles the ending for me.
Posted By: Steve on October 4, 2007 at 10:13 pmReport this comment
I love Facade, which I first encountered listening to the radio furtively at night as a teenager (don’t ask), and it was so delightful and strange–in fact it was Sir Beelzebub in particular that hooked me. I had no idea who Sitwell was, or Walton, but I was into music and poetry and the idea they could go so completely together was novel. I haven’t thought of it in an age, but it occurs to me it was actually pretty influential on me at some level–at least in early experiments.
Posted By: Alicia (AE) on October 5, 2007 at 1:36 amDo you know Terri Witek’s Carnal World? It has a whole section on The Sitwells–or rather on their sitting for John Singer Sargent… You might find it interesting.
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Steve, I wasn’t intending to express admiration for “Still Falls the Rain” as a poem, but rather for its odd longevity; similarly, along the lines of Riding and Graves, I was conveying that don’t have much admiration for anthlogies, either. It’s one thing to discover a Stiwell (or a Graves or a Riding (Jackson) in just the way this thread describes, another to be beset with set pieces! The discussion here actually illustrates the value of real reading and exploration as against the artificial elevation of a poem or poet here or there.
Posted By: Don Share on October 5, 2007 at 8:59 amReport this comment
I would have recoiled from Sitwell had “After the Rain” been the first poem I came across!
Posted By: Ange on October 5, 2007 at 9:41 amDon, your thoughts about “the value of real reading and exploration” has much to do with my next post, which I was just sketching this morning. Serendipity!
I do know the Aiken poem (wasn’t it in the Oscar Williams anth? What self-respecting poetic teenager didn’t read that?). But I don’t know Terri Witek…
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Now that I see what Don was saying, I agree with him entirely. And I want to read that next post!
Posted By: Steve on October 5, 2007 at 12:25 pmReport this comment
Facade has always impressed me as a great intro to some of the principles of avant-garde sound-poems—and I have always wondered why Sitwell goes on to abandon the inventive euphonies of these early works for a more dour tone of “conservatism” later in her career.
Posted By: Christian Bök on October 5, 2007 at 6:55 pmWhen I was asked to produce a syllabus for the field exams in our doctoral programme, I made sure to include this work by her on the list….
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“I have always wondered why Sitwell goes on to abandon the inventive euphonies of these early works for a more dour tone of ‘conservatism’ later in her career.”
Posted By: Ange on October 5, 2007 at 9:17 pmChristian, that seems to be the trajectory of many an avant-gardist. Why do poets get conservative as they age? A topic for a separate blog entry, perhaps.
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I know what you’re saying, but I feel uncomfortable with it because it seems like a version of the dismissive comment (in the field of political beliefs) that “only the young can afford to be socialist”– whereas this has a lot to do with larger historical cycles. Do poets get more conservative as they age? Not all, obviously; the best get more fiercely radical, with less and less to lose.
Posted By: Vivek Narayanan on October 7, 2007 at 1:00 pmWhen poets do get more conservative, this seems to have something to do with the pressures of the market, or something like it, the need for survival, the desperation in search of an audience, or the cynical, defeated withdrawal into the depths of the self. It’s never a pretty sight, and almost always, time and time again, a losing proposition: they never end up writing the great poetry they think they’re going to write, and they risk being confined to the dustbin of history.
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