"... the exploitation of the elegiac ..."

"One of the most interesting things about Edith Sitwell's art is the way in which all aspects of it seem to be present at every stage of her development, while at each stage one particular aspect becomes dominant. At the next stage, in the The Sleeping Beauty (1924), she turned away from satirical inventions of Façade, and devoted herself to the exploitation of the elegiac, romantic vein which she had already begun to work in Bucolic Comedies. The contrast at first sight between the world of Don Pasquito and Mr Belaker, 'the allegro, negro cocktail-shaker,' and The Soldan's Song, with its Elizabethan and Keatsian echoes, could scarcely be sharper ..." (19)