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See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, — dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown. Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain —
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."
Edith Sitwell
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I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell,
I'm not the man to insist on asphodel.
This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think?
It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.
Edith Sitwell
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By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.
Edith Sitwell
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If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.
Edith Sitwell
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Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
Edith Sitwell
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In later years the great novelist who was known as George Eliot had, in spite of her ugliness, a monolithic, mysterious, primeval grandeur of countenance, like that of an Easter Island statue, washed by oceans of light.
Edith Sitwell
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Still falls the Rain —
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds, — those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark...
Edith Sitwell
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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.
Edith Sitwell
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A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
Edith Sitwell
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It is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.
Edith Sitwell
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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.
Edith Sitwell
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Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.
Edith Sitwell
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My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.
Edith Sitwell
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Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints
Edith Sitwell
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I am resigned to the fact that people who don't know me loathe me. Perhaps it is because I am a woman writing poetry. It must be annoying to a man who wants to write to see this horrid old lady who can.
Edith Sitwell
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The trouble about most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation, or hope to be one in the next.
Edith Sitwell
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The child and the great artist — these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.
Edith Sitwell
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People are usually made Dames for virtues I do not possess.
Edith Sitwell
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The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.
Edith Sitwell
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What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die.
Edith Sitwell
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I am as unpopular as an electric eel in a pool of flatfish.
Edith Sitwell
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Remember only this of our hopeless love
That never till Time is done
Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.
Edith Sitwell
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A lady asked me why, on most occasions, I wore black. 'Are you in mourning?'
'Yes.'
'For whom are you in mourning?'
'For the world.'
Edith Sitwell
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Cameras have arisen in our midst like a new race of mechanical ghouls.
Edith Sitwell
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By 'happiness' I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.
Edith Sitwell
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Edith Sitwell
Creative Commons
Born:
September 7, 1887
Died:
December 9, 1964
(aged 77)
Bio:
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells.
Known for:
Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946)
A poet's notebook (1943)
The Queens and the Hive (1962)
English Women (1942)
Victoria of England (1935)
Most used words:
heart
man
poetry
fire
time
light
people
blood
mad
reality
moment
life
love
sister
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