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Edith Sitwell: Modernity and Tradition

Edith Sitwell was a shock-trooper of the poetic avant garde, a champion of modernity who revelled in the use of shock tactics to push the boundaries of poetry, angering traditionalists in the process. Perhaps, therefore, she would seem an unlikely convert to the creed and traditions of the Catholic Church. Yet, like her friend, “the ultra-modern novelist” Evelyn Waugh, she would come to realize that the liberating power of orthodoxy could transfuse tradition with the dynamism of truth.