“Glittering like the wind”

This chapter examines Edith Sitwell’s relationship with other women writers of her time and the idea of “women’s writing.” Although often considered to be anti-feminist, Sitwell strove to articulate what she called a “female poetry” in the face of dismissal by male critics. This chapter argues that her intertextual dialogues with Algernon Swinburne, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. help to build an aesthetic practice outside the rigid masculinity of traditional modernism. From all three poets, Sitwell gleans both methodology, focused on the physicality of poetic language, and ideology, focused on representations of women’s voices. From Swinburne comes the romantic and doomed Sappho, from Stein the invisible wife “Sacred Emily,” and from H.D. the voice of lost-but-found Eurydice. However, in her intertextual responses to each of these, Sitwell also revises the work of the earlier writers. In Swinburne, Stein, and H.D. the poem represents the voice of the woman as lost. However, in Sitwell’s poetry, the very physical properties of words, rhyme, meter, assonance, and so on reinforce the idea that the voicing of the poem is always present.