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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

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Edith Sitwell
Age: 77 †
Born: 1887
Born: September 7
Died: 1964
Died: December 9
Biographer
Essayist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Scarborough
North Yorkshire
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
Edith Louisa Sitwell
Dame Edith Sitwell
Miss Edith
Universe
Paradise
Heart
Forgotten
Unveils
Things
Meaning
Paradises
Poetry
Ennobles
Eyes
Restores
Secret
Discovers
Upon
Dwell
Eye
Rays

More quotes by 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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I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.
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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The light would show (if it could harden) Eternities of kitchen garden
Edith Sitwell
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[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.
Edith Sitwell
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As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.
Edith Sitwell
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If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?
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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Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.
Edith Sitwell
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Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.
Edith Sitwell
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I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.
Edith Sitwell
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Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Edith Sitwell
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I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.
Edith Sitwell
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... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.
Edith Sitwell
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Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the Light The marrow in the bone We dreamed was safe. . . the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree Were springs of Deity.
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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The living blind and seeing Dead together lie As if in love . . . There was no more hating then, And no more love Gone is the heart of Man.
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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The reason why Matthew Arnold, to my feeling, fails entirely as a poet (though no doubt his ideas were good - at least, I am told they were) is that he had no sense of touch whatsoever. Nothing made any impression on his skin. He could feel neither the shape nor the texture of a poem with his hands.
Edith Sitwell
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I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.
Edith Sitwell