Sitwell, Dame Edith, (1887-1964)

English poet, born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and educated privately. She and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell were the most famous literary family of their time. Sitwell’s writing, eccentric behavior, and strikingly dramatic dress both shocked and amused people.

Fiction

The Young and the Evil (with Parker Tyler) (1933)

Poetry

A Pamphlet of Sonnets (1936)

The Garden of Disorder (1938)

ABC’s (1940)

The Overturned Lake (1941)

Poems for Painters (1945)

The Half-Thoughts, The Distances of Pain (1947)

Sleep in a Nest of Flames (1949)

Spare Parts (1966)

Silver Flower Coo (1968)

Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems (1972)

7 poems (1974)

Om Krishna I: Special Effects (1972)

Om Krishna II: from the Sickroom of the Walking Eagles (1981)

Om Krishna III (1982)

Emblems of Arachne (1986)

Chronology

1913 – Born February 10, Brookhaven, Mississippi.

1929 – Dropout from High School, started little mag Blues, Columbus, Miss.

1931 – To Paris and the salons of Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, Marie-Louise Bousquet. Became friends with Man Ray, Kay Boyle, Janet Flanner, Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes and others of the Expatriate colony in Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-les-Près.

1932 – To Morocco, lured by Paul Bowles’ glowing accounts. Joined there by Djuna Barnes; typed for her the novel she’d just completed, Nightwood.

1933 -T he Young and Evil, novel written in collaboration with Parker Tyler, published by Obelisk Press, Paris; banned in England and America.

1934 – Return to New York, bringing Pavel Tchelitchew. The milieu was Carl Van Vechten, Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein, Julien Levy, Orson Welles, George Balanchine, Cummings, Ruth Ford –et al., augmented by visiting friends-from-overseas: Cecil Beaton, Leonor Fini, Hoyningen-Huene, Dali, etc.

1938 – First full-length book of poems, The Garden of Disorder, introduction by William Carlos Williams.

1940 – ABC’s–poem with Joseph Cornell collage cover. Started View, which evolved into the magazine that advanced the European artists in New York (who were to influence the art scene in America): Tchelitchew, Tanguy, Ernst, Masson. View Editions, during the Forties, published first monograph on Marcel Duchamp and first book translations of André Breton’s poems.

1941 – New Poems, The Overturned Lake, with Matta’s title page and frontispiece.

1949 – New Poems, Sleep in a Nest of Flames, with Edith Sitwell’s preface.

1952 – To Europe with Tchelitchew, constant companion since 1934 (a relationship that was to end only with Tchelitchew’s death in Rome, 1957).

1955 – Thirty Images from Italy, exhibition of photographs at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

1956 – First one-man show of paintings and drawings, Paris, catalog foreword by Jean Cocteau.

1962 – Return to U.S.A. Period of association with Pop artists and underground filmmakers.

1965 – Poem Posters, exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom gallery, triggered color-poster explosion. Film made of this show chosen for Fourth International Avant-Garde Film Festival, Belgium.

1966 – Spare Parts – ‘artist’s book’ produced in colorphoto-litho, Athens, Greece.

1968 – Silver Flower Coo – collage poems. (Looks “like no other book ever published in America” – Richard Kostelanetz.)

1971 – New York premier of feature film, Johnny Minotaur, ‘conceived, directed and photographed by Charles Henri Ford on the Island of Crete.’

1972 – Flag of Ecstasy – Selected Poems.

1974 – The Kathmandu Experience: exhibition at the New York Cultural Center of works created in Nepal: wood sculptures, wall hangings, prints.

1976 – Postcards to Charles Henri Ford: exhibition of 108 postcards from friends over a 25-year period.

1979 – Om Krishna, volume one in a tetralogy of new poetry.