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On Technique and Judgement in Modernist Poetics

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: On Technique and Judgement in Modernist PoeticsWriting for the London Vogue in 1925, Edith Sitwell weighs up the relative merits of Aurora Leigh (1856) and 'Goblin Market' (1862):When we ask ourselves why Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' is one of the best poems ever written by a woman, and why Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Aurora Leigh' is not, the answer is this.It is not only a matter of inspiration: Christina Rossetti in her poem found and made use of a technique and a manner suitable to feminine muscles, whereas Mrs. Browning used a technique and a manner which is only suitable to a man.Failure was the inevitable result.Women poets will do best if they realise that male technique is not suitable to them.No woman writing in the English language has ever written a great sonnet, no woman has ever written great blank verse.Then again, speaking generally, as we cannot dispense with our rules, so we find free verse difficult.1 Sitwell then cautions that women's poetry is no less valuable or successful than men's; it is just different, she says, and it is different because it has-or ought to have-a different technique.Sitwell often writes about technique, especially in the 1920s.Sometimes, but not always, she emphasizes gender.Sometimes she uses the concept of technique to explain and to justify her own work, and others sometimes use the concept to explain and to evaluate Sitwell's work, too.In 1921, T. S. Eliot opines that, though Sitwell is 'tediously given to repeating herself', this repetition is perhaps her consciousness of the fact that she has a genuine little vision of the age, quite her own.This peculiar way of seeing things, which is not capable of much development, is what is interesting; not her technique, which is insufficient.2
DOI: 10.1111/criq.70030
Author: Sean Pryor
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417068696
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