Elegy on Dead Fashion

21 pp. Edith Sitwell, in full Dame Edith Sitwell, (born September 7, 1887, Scarborough, Yorkshire, England - died December 9, 1964, London), English poet who first gained fame for her stylistic artifices but who emerged during World War II as a poet of emotional depth and profoundly human concerns. She was equally famed for her formidable personality, Elizabethan dress, and eccentric opinions. A member of a distinguished literary family, she was the daughter of Sir George Sitwell and the sister of Sir Osbert and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. Her first book, The Mother and Other Poems, appeared in 1915. She began to attract attention by editing in 1916 an annual anthology, Wheels, in which she and her brothers led a spirited revolt against the prevailing poetry of the Georgians. The notoriety sought by the Sitwells in their artistic battles may, at the time, have obscured the originality of her talent. The visual sensibility and verbal music of her early poetry, Clowns' Houses (1918), Bucolic Comedies (1923), and The Sleeping Beauty (1924), in which she created her own world of beautiful objects, nursery symbols, and unfamiliar images, revealed the influence of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Her emphasis on the value of sound in poetry was shown especially in Facade (1923), for which William Walton wrote a musical accompaniment. Gold Coast Customs (1929), with its harsher and more agonized imagery, marked the end of a period of experiment. In 1930 her Collected Poems appeared. - Britannica