Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

In Georgette Heyer’s novel Regency Buck, Mrs. Scattergood’s description of herself fits my first impression of Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) perfectly: “I am shockingly expensive, but you won’t mind that, I daresay. Oh, you are looking at my gown and thinking what a very odd appearance I present. You see, I am not pretty, not in the least, never was, and so I have to be odd. Nothing for it! It answers delightfully.”

Edith Sitwell, in a less flamboyant outfit than usual,
painted by unknown Parisian artist, circa 1927

Edith Sitwell made deliberate choices – her clothes and her poetry were meant to be controversial. Even now, photographs of Sitwell in her costumes easily rival Lady Gaga’s early dress-to-shock style. Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen likened her to “a high altar on the move.”

Yet behind Sitwell’s carefully created outrageous façade, there’s a lot more going on. As she wrote years later in her introduction to The Canticle of the Rose: “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.”

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“The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.” – Edith Sitwell

Poetry

Enobles the heart and the eyes,
and unveils the meaning of all things
upon which the heart and the eyes dwell.
It discovers the secret rays of the universe,
and restores to us forgotten paradises.

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