Mislaid Poets: Edith Sitwell

Names sound old when they don't get reused in later generations, which may artificially date their poetry as well. Sitwell is a curious figure, though. Her parents, baronettes, didn't care for her looks and ungainly height, so they verbally abused her. When she took to headdresses and accoutrements that fit her features, she became sought after for portrait paintings (see 1915 Roger Fry painting).

Unlike her parent, she and her brothers bonded and weathered later withering criticism from critics who lambasted her book Facades (using its title against itself), which she had performed on stage with music. The brothers and Edith sassed the critics back. Perhaps the dislike of her parents (yet with the backing of her brothers) gave her the backbone she needed to survive her later critics. And she went on to other books.

One can see something to the complaints:

When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell
Where Proserpine first fell.... 

Nobody comes to give him his rum but the

Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum

--From "Sir Beelzebub"

There are other sillinesses here. When you wield a really bad pun like "syllabub," you can look at it two ways--a lack of seriousness that deserves dismissal (the perspective of a serious reader who looks down on humor in poetry), or as a thumbed nose at those who look down on humor in poetry.

Also the breaks are jagged and seemingly randomly assigned. It's off-putting but it feels as intentional as perhaps the humor.

But clearly, Sitwell is committed not just to rhymes but assonance, repeating long sounds,  especially--in ways that almost make the poems feel more like musical compositions.

Not just sound is repeated but phrases like "Still falls the rain" which repeats like a bass drum. She also plays with surreal synasthesia like "to the still thirsting heart / that holds the fires" or from "Aubade":

Each dull blunt wooden stalactite
Of rain creaks, hardened by light, 

Sounding like an overtone

 It's hard to say if she is more interested in the literary mode or the effect, but they become distinguishing features of her work.

Finally the rhyme (both end and internal) makes her verse feel formal, but the variable feet and meter erode that. Also sometimes the rhymes might look like they rhyme, but are slant (from "Country Dance"):

So I went
And leant
Where none but the doltish coltish wind
Nuzzled my hand for what it could find
As it neighed,
I said