Edith Sitwell for real_funny_lady@lj
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.


BELLS OF GRAY CRYSTAL
Bells of gray crystal
Break on each bough--
The swans' breath will mist all
The cold airs now.
Like tall pagodas
Two people go,
Trail their long codas
Of talk through the snow.
Lonely are these
And lonely am I ....
The clouds, gray Chinese geese
Sleek through the sky.

ANSWERS
I kept my answers small and kept them near;
Big questions bruised my mind but still I let
Small answers be a bullwark to my fear.

The huge abstractions I kept from the light;
Small things I handled and caressed and loved.
I let the stars assume the whole of night.


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Portrait of Edith Sitwell on her
Christmas card for 1958.
Photograph by Lancelot Law Whyte

Her biographer Victoria Glendinning:

Not until her twenties was the real Edith Sitwell born. Freed from her unhappy home life she set up home in a shabby London flat: she became - almost overnight - one of the best-known 1920s pioneering poets. Her Plantagenet good looks attracted the photographer Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. She befriended Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The thirties she spent in penury, writing her novels, poems and biographies and it was only when Yeats hailed her as 'a major poet' that her work reached a wider audience and she set off to conquer New York and Hollywood.

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