Edith Sitwell - Poetry Quotes

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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
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
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
If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

Edith Sitwell
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart, and is, in Emerson's phrase, a larger imbibing of the common heart.

Edith Sitwell
As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Edith Sitwell
Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.

Edith Sitwell
I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed — it is, indeed, unavoidable.

Edith Sitwell