Edith Sitwell (1887 – 1964)
English poet and critic.
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.
I'm afraid I'm being an awful nuisance.
I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.
I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
The flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind
Is but a foolish wind.
It is a part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.
Let us speak of our madness. We are always being called mad. If we are mad — we and our brothers in America who are walking hand in hand with us in the vanguard of progress — at least we are mad in company with most of our great predecessors and all the most intelligent foreigners. Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth were all mad in turn. We shall be proud to join them in the Asylum to which they are now consigned.
I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.
Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?
I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself.
Mother or Murderer, you have
given or taken life —
Now all is one!
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
Remember only this of our hopeless love
That never till Time is done
Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.
Each of them is inhabited by a bland demon, as the German metaphysicians used to call that which gets into a man and makes him creative, not so forcibly that it turns them away from criticism, but valid enough to give them the right to speak with the authority of artists.
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
Still falls the Rain —
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss —
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.
Her tall figure, swathed in black, looking like some strange eccentric bird... she seemed like an ageing princess come home from exile.
Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.