Edith Sitwell
Edith Sitwell
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBEwas a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 September 1877
dying good-health very-good
I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.
cat heaven legs
My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don't! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.
mother heart men
The ghost of the heart of manred Cain And the more murderous brain Of Man, still redder Nero that conceived the death Of his mother Earth, and tore Her womb, to know the place where he was conceived.
heart men evil
But I saw the little-Ant men as they ran Carrying the world's weight of the world's filth And the filth in the heart of Man-- Compressed till those lusts and greeds had a greater heat than that of the Sun.
regret thinking special
What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.
hands ideas feelings
The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.
law poetry age
In the Augustan age ... poetry was ... the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature ...
heart poetry great-poet
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ...
heart dark self
The last faint spark In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark, The wounds of the baited bear,-- The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat On his helpless flesh . . . the tears of the hunted hare.
thinking greed poetry
I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.
mother simple men
Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.
lying book giving
Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.
art men doe
"It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees."
life hymns glory
My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.