The English poet and critic Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) was one of England's dominating literary figures for half a century and its most eminent woman poet.

Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough on Sept. 7, 1887, into a family of landed gentry. Her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, both younger, also became celebrated writers. She was privately educated on the family estate at Renishaw until she entered the literary circles of London shortly before the beginning of World War I. Her first volume, The Mother and Other Poems, was published in 1915, and the following year she began to edit an annual anthology, Wheels, which set out to repudiate the comfortable, familiar, English sentimentalities of the Georgian poets. Its bizarre, satirical, self-conscious verse anticipated that judgment of the contemporary scene that was to be perfectly articulated shortly thereafter by T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland. Edith Sitwell was thus in the vanguard...