THE SONG OF THE COLD
[Poems]
BY EDITH SITWELL
-
- NY: The Vanguard Press, Inc.
©1948.
- First Edition by this publisher with no additional printings
indicated.
- 9½
x 6½
inches (24 x 16.5 cm).
- 113 pages. Complete.
- Ex-library h
ardcover
with the usual markings in good condition. The dust jacket shows some wear
and tape repairs
and is not price-clipped. Remnants of Mylar sleeve on front and rear
pastedowns. The pages are clean, and the binding is strong.
-
- An excellent reading copy!
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE
(7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964) was a British poet and critic. Edith
Sitwell was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, the only daughter of the eccentric
Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy
and landscaping. Her mother was the former Lady Ida Emily Augusta Denison, a
daughter of the Earl of Londesborough and a granddaughter of Henry Somerset, 7th
Duke of Beaufort. She claimed a descent through female lines from the
Plantagenets.
Her relationship with her parents was stormy at best, not least because her
father made her undertake a "cure" for her supposed spinal deformation—involving
locking her into an iron frame. In her later autobiography, she said that her
parents had always been strangers to her.
In 1912, 25-year-old Sitwell moved to a small, shabby fourth-floor flat in
Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater, which she shared with Helen Rootham (1875-1938),
her governess since 1903.
Edith never married. However, it is claimed that in 1927 she fell in love with
the homosexual Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. The relationship with
Tchelitchew lasted until 1928; the same year when Helen Rootham underwent
operations for cancer, eventually becoming an invalid. In 1932, Rootham and
Sitwell moved to Paris, where they lived with Rootham’s younger sister, Evelyn
Wiel. Rootham died of spinal cancer in 1938.
Sitwell's mother died in 1937. Sitwell did not attend the funeral because of her
displeasure with her parents during her childhood.
During World War II, Sitwell returned from France and retired to Renishaw with
her brother Osbert and his lover, David Horner. She wrote under the light of oil
lamps when the lights of England were out of service. She knitted clothes for
their friends who served in the army. One of the beneficiaries was young Alec
Guinness, who received a pair of seaboot stockings.
The poems she wrote during the war brought her back before a public. They
include Street Songs (1942), The Song of the Cold (1945) and The Shadow of Cain
(1947), all of which were much praised. Still Falls the Rain, about the London
blitz, remains perhaps her best-known poem (it was set to music by Benjamin
Britten as Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain).
Her poem The Bee-Keeper was set to music by Priaulx Rainier, as The Bee Oracles
(1970), a setting for tenor, flute, oboe, violin, cello and harpsichord. It was
premiered by Peter Pears in 1970.
In 1943, her father died in Switzerland, his wealth depleted. In 1948, a reunion
with Tchelitchew, whom she had not seen since before the war, went badly.
In 1948 Sitwell toured the United States with her brothers, reciting her poetry
and, notoriously, giving a reading of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene. Her
poetry recitals were always occasions; she made recordings of her poems,
including two recordings of Façade, the first with Constant Lambert as
co-narrator, and the second with Peter Pears.
Tchelitchew died in April 1957. Her brother Osbert died in 1969, of Parkinson's
disease, diagnosed in 1950. Sitwell became a Dame Commander (DBE) in 1954. In
1955, Sitwell converted to Roman Catholicism.
Sitwell wrote two books about Queen Elizabeth I of England, Fanfare for
Elizabeth (1946) and The Queens and the Hive (1962). She always claimed that she
wrote prose simply for money and both these books were extremely successful, as
were her English Eccentrics (1933) and Victoria of England (1936).
Around 1957 she was confined to a wheelchair. Her last poetry reading was in
1962. She died of cerebral haemorrhage at St. Thomas’s Hospital on December 9,
1964 at the age of 77.
-From Wikipedia.
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