Good Taste Is the Worst Vice

A few weeks ago I remarked that if I were to write a book on poetic craft, it would mainly consist of notes on craft from other disciplines like dance or music. I keep a file of such quotes (I guess this used to be called one’s “common-place book” but now it’s just an endlessly scrolling doc on a laptop). I went back to it today and saw that I had juxtaposed these two:

“I was heartily congratulated on my perfectly placed mishap, for Mr. B. is known to like those who fall; it indicates an energy and fearlessness that is essential to excitement.” (Toni Bentley in Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal, recounting an episode in Balanchine’s class where she stumbled)
“[William Carlos Williams] wouldn’t make so much of the great American language if he were plausible; and tractable. That’s the beauty of it; he is willing to be reckless; if you can’t be that, what’s the point of the whole thing?” (interview with Marianne Moore)

I’ve always liked high-wire acts (energy, fearlessness, recklessness) in poetry. Anyway, in response to my remark Ben Friedlander dropped the name Edith Sitwell in my comment box, and off I went to get her A Poet’s Notebook from the library. And I was well rewarded with quotes from Baudelaire, Whitman, Cocteau, Emerson …. Wait, I thought. Edith Sitwell isn’t who I thought she was. I had a vague notion of a conservative English poetess (despite the fact that I knew she had an admirer in Robert Duncan).
So, noodling around the library, I decided to look up some of her poems. And I found this in The Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse (chosen by Philip Larkin):
SIR BEELZEBUB
When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell
     Where Proserpine first fell,
Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea,
     (Rocking and shocking the barmaid).
Nobody comes to give him his rum but the
Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum
Enhances the chances to bless with a benison
Alfred Lord Tennyson crossing the bar laid
With cold vegetation from pale deputations
Of temperance workers (all signed In Memoriam)
Hoping with glory to trip up the Laureate’s feet,
     (Moving in classical metres) …
Like Balaclava, the lava came down from the
Roof, and the sea’s blue wooden gendarmerie
Took them in charge while Beelzebub roared for his rum.
     … None of them come!
How utterly bizarre. What nonsense. Naturally, I’m interested. This poem hails from a 1918 series called Façade, in which she explored unusual rhythms. (It was later set to music by William Walton.) In a tradition capacious enough for Crashaw’s baroquery, why not Sitwell?
The internet tells me her “Good taste is the worst vice ever invented” is a famous quotation, and that she was estranged from her eccentric aristocratic parents after a childhood in which she was immobilized on an iron frame supposedly to cure a spinal deformation. I suppose after being tortured by an iron frame, one would indeed be bent on smithing stranger meters.
Finally, Facades, through Walton’s music, eventually metamorphosed into a Frederick Ashton ballet in 1931.