Edith Sitwell, Yodeling Centaurs
Towards the unloved bottom of a pile of modern literature that I picked up at auction last week, I found a copy of Edith Sitwell’s Rustic Elegies (Knopf, 1927) in a nearly destroyed jacket.
I was going to slap $8 on it and put it on the shelf – times being what they are for the Sitwells – when out popped a funny promotional photo of Dame Edith in one of her get-ups.
Two copies of the same photo, actually, both from the prominent speaker’s agency W. Colston Leigh. Flipping through the book, I found a ticket for a talk with Sitwell and her younger brother Osbert from December 1948. She’d also signed the poem Centaurs and Centauresses (A Yodeling Song) which, I imagine, she read that evening.
Now, even after all this, the book might only pay for lunch, but this ticket to listen to two poet’s speak, cost, in today’s dollars, $23.
9/21/2012