Sitwell, Edith. (1887 - 1964).

- an eccentric artist flamboyant both in her dress and manner

- provoked tight bourgeois conventions by both her work and life

- a poetry anthology reacting against the romantic ruralism of the Georgian Poetry anthologies

- eighteen provocative and flippant lyrics for the musical Façade

- written as exact complements to the music by William Walton: neither the poems nor the music achieve their full effect when separated

- varied in style and mood, but: all exercise rhythm, rhyme, assonance or dissonance

- recited by the poet herself though a megaphone placed against a hole in the curtain => eliminated the personality of the reciter

Street Songs (1942), Green Song (1944), and The Song of the Cold (1945):

- collections of her own poetry

< indebted to T. S. Eliot's later verse

< reflects her interest in history, her religious devotion, and the WW II

- her favourite images: juvenescence and senescence, dark and light, the passion of Christ

> "Still Falls the Rain" (1940):

- sees Christ recrucified in the London Blitz "each day, each night"

Quote

"Still falls the Rain — / Dark as the world of man, black as our loss — / Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails / Upon the Cross."

From "Still Falls the Rain" (1940).

(Photo: Famous Poets & Poems com).

Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.

Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.

Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.

Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.

Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.