Edith Sitwell, 1959 described by Elizabeth Bowen as a 'high altar on the move'.

Edith Sitwell has been whispering to me today...

'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.'

'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, photo by George Platt Lynes, 1937

'Why not be oneself? If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a pekingese?'

Said the skeleton lying upon the
sands of time -
"The great gold planet that
is the mourning heat
of the sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a lion that fire
consumes
Like all that grows or leaps...so
is the heart.

Edith Sitwell photographed by Cecil Beaton