Volume 4, Number 8 · May 20, 1965
Nothing Like a Dame
By Geoffrey Grigson
Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell
by Edith Sitwell
Atheneum, 239 pp., $5.95
How are we to explain or explain away (since it is going to need some explaining away for our posterity) the eminence or the acceptance or the at times reverential praise of the poems of the late Edith Sitwell? The poems will fall apart. They strike me, when I look at them again, as a tumble of imitation reliquaries. Of her early poems—the reliquaries are the later ones—some had the tinkliness of a broken music-box, some exhibited the arch simple-mindedness, not always pleasant-mindedness, of a neo-Victorian bouquet of wax and silk under the jags of a dome. Then the war, the bombs, the Great Bomb, and the reliquaries, inside of which there might—or might not—be the scraps of some body of holiness.
Review, 1619 words
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