Edith Sitwell And The Symbolist Tradition

Kenneth Rexroth''s 1961 Assays states that''''Edith Sitwell is the nearest thing to a major poet that the British Isles have produced since Hardy Lawrence and Yeats. With the exception of Hugh McDiarmid she is now the only British poet who possesses that special accent of both individuality and scope which makes a writer a member of world literature. Possibly this is because like the others she is both intensely national even local — in her case ''''country'''' if you will – and yet aware in a living way of the literature of the whole civilized community its problems its ambitions its disasters….. her poetry was just art.'''' Inadequate attention has been paid to her development as a social poet as a religious poet and as a visionary. Edith Sitwell needs to be remembered not only as not only as the bright young parodist of Façade but as the angry chronicler of social injustice.