Abstract
The history of women’s poetry in the early part of the twentieth century has been one of absence: absence from bookstores and library shelves and even from course lists. However, this situation is now changing and this chapter aims to contribute to that change by considering the work of Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See V. Glendinning, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn among Lions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) p. 3.
E. Sitwell, ‘Colonel Faxtock’, in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1965) p. 174; hereafter referred to as CP with poem titles and page references given in the text.
E. Sitwell, quoted by R. H. Ross, The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal (London: Faber, 1965) p. 195.
V. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) P. 77.
See Julia Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 October 1973, pp. 1249–50.
Geoffrey Thurley, The Ironic Harvest: English Poetry in the Twentieth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1974) p. 136.
‘we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest’ (J. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, in J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) pp. 278–93, at pp. 280–1).
E. Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste’, in Imagist Poetry, ed. with an introduction by P. Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp. 130–4.
A. Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London and New York: Methuen, 1983) p. 74.
See C. K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (London: Hutchinson, 1986) p. 82.
W. Kerr, ‘Counting Sheep’, in Georgian Poetry V, ed. E. Marsh (London: Poetry Bookshop, 1920–22).
C. Mew, ‘Fame’ in Collected Poems and Prose, ed. V. Warner (London: Virago, 1982) p. 3; hereafter referred to as CPP with poem titles and page references given in the text.
R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. D. Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1988) pp. 167–72.
For an excellent account of this process, see S. Hall and B. Schwartz, ‘State and Society 1880–1930’, in Crises in the British State 1880–1930 (London: Hutchinson, 1983) pp. 7–33.
Difference is the process which enables language to signify. It is because words are different from one another, not because they correspond to objects in the world, that they have meaning. However, this meaning is never fully present in words because it always depends on other words which come before and after them. For this reason — given here in a brutally reductive form — Derrida argues that meaning is deferred. For a full account of this process, see J. Derrida, ‘Difference’, in J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982) pp. 3–27.
See T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet’, in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1976) pp. 141–6, at p. 145.
See J. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977) especially ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, pp. 281–91 and ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of the Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, pp. 292–324.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1995 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Day, G., Wisker, G. (1995). Recuperating and Revaluing: Edith Sitwell and Charlotte Mew. In: Day, G., Docherty, B. (eds) British Poetry, 1900–50. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24000-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24000-5_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-53279-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-24000-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)