Of all the modern poets who came of age during the second decade of the twentieth century, Edith Sitwell remains the least understood and least appreciated. The reasons for this apparent neglect are several: sex prejudice, reluctance to admit a woman to Parnassus; class prejudice, reluctance to accept as a serious poet the granddaughter of the Earl of Londesborough; a belief in poetry as a private art, which made Edith Sitwell's public notoriety, as well as her performances of her poetry, suspect; and the mistaken idea, derived from a misreading of the early poems, that Sitwell was a poet without ideas. Edith Sitwell was born into an aristocratic country family. She was the daughter of Sir George Sitwell and his wife, Lady Ida Denison, daughter of Lord and Lady Londesborough. Her childhood was spent at her parents' home, Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, and at her grandparents' home in...