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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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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
Use
Would
Unseeing
Poetry
Asks
Religion

More quotes by 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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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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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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The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
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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I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.
Edith Sitwell
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Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
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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All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.
Edith Sitwell
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... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.
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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The last faint spark In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark, The wounds of the baited bear,-- The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat On his helpless flesh . . . the tears of the hunted hare.
Edith Sitwell
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Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.
Edith Sitwell
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What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.
Edith Sitwell
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The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of a moment of their other lives - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.
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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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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What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.
Edith Sitwell
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All great art contains an element of the irrational.
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