Life & Wisdom Quote by Edith Sitwell

Sitwell frames poetry as a kind of contraband: not entertainment, not ornament, but a message slipped under the door to the self you buried to become functional. The sting is in her assumption that the “other life” isn’t rarefied or mystical; it’s common property. Everyone has it. Everyone has also participated in its cover-up.

Her phrasing does two things at once. “Speaks to all men” sounds grand, almost priestly, but she immediately undercuts any comfort by naming what’s been done to that inner life: it’s been “smothered.” That verb suggests both violence and intimacy, the way a pillow is pressed down. The subtext is accusation as much as consolation. Modern life doesn’t merely distract you; it trains you to collaborate in your own diminishment, to forget the parts of you that don’t generate credentials, income, or acceptable opinions.

Context matters here: Sitwell wrote through two world wars and the rise of mass culture, when propaganda, social conformity, and mechanized catastrophe made “ordinary” language feel corrupted or insufficient. Modernist poetry, often caricatured as elitist, becomes in her view the opposite: a rescue operation for the private and the unmarketable. The “poet” isn’t a special snowflake but a specialist in recall, someone who can name what has been pushed into silence.

The intent is quietly polemical. Sitwell defends poetry’s relevance by relocating it from the gallery to the psyche: it works because it doesn’t flatter your present self. It addresses the life you didn’t live, the feelings you edited out, the imagination you disciplined into obedience.