Edith edicts

"At 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.

"Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch."

"The violence of an epoch is responsible for the technical experiments of painters and poets of today. How to attain speed is the problem. And, as far as poets are concerned, to do this we must study the effect of texture on rhythm. These experiments are, for the most part, of a violent order. And if you ask why rhythms have become more violent, the answer is: this is an age of machinery, a wild race for time, confined within limits that are at once mad and circumscribed. Try to get out, and you will knock your head against the walls of materialism. This state of things is mirrored in modern syncopated dance-music, which removes music from the world of inspiration (which evolves itself organically from the inner need of the artist and brings it into the world of machinery where form is superimposed as a local idea). There is no time or space in which to dream. It is because of this that in those poems which deal with the world crumbling into dust, or with materialism building monstrous shapes out of the deadened dust, I, for one, use the most complicated dance-rhythms which could be found, or else syncopated rhythms which are not dance-rhythms."

Edith Sitwell, from Taken Care Of: An Autobiography

(via Andrew Parker)

Her ideas about what she was trying to do might be more interesting than the poems themselves

"The poems in Façade are in many cases, virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music."

"The technical experiments in these poems consist, for the most part, of enquiries into the effect on rhythm and on speed of the use of rhymes, assonances and dissonances placed not only at the end of lines, but at the beginning, and in different and most elaborate patterns throughout the verse, and, too, there are enquiries into the effect on speed of equivalent syllables. By this I mean that if you use one three-syllabled word, it has a greater speed than the three one-syllabled words which might have been used as its equivalent. The use of two rhymes placed immediately together at the end of each of two lines, sound like leaps in the air.

‘ “Sally, Mary, Mattie, what’s the matter, why cry?”

The huntsman and the reynard-coloured sun and I sigh;’

Other experiments were made to discover the effect on rhythm of thickening and thinning, sharpening and softening, consonants, as in certain lines of the ‘Waltz’:

‘The stars in their apiaries,

Sylphs in their aviaries,’"

And here are some Wildean wisecracks and barbed comments from Edith: 

"I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her "a beautiful little knitter"."

describing Virginia Woolf in a letter to Geoffrey Singleton (11 July 1955)

c.f Woolf's dismissive comments about James Joyce

"I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself." 

As Andrew notes, this is very Morrissey-esque, which is to say very Wildean. 

And then more of an aphorism: 

"What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear."

In the inner sleeve of Welcome To the Pleasuredome, ZTT offers a bunch of merchandise, including the Edith Sitwell Bag For Life's Little Luxuries. I wonder if anyone sent off for these and other things ? e.g. Andre Gide socks, Sophisticated Virginia Woolf vest, Jean Genet boxers shorts etc, all modelled by Paul Rutherford and Claudia Brucken