Talk:Elizabeth Sewell (writer)

Page move to Elizabeth Sewell (writer)
I would like to move this page to one with the new title Elizabeth Sewell (writer). I am working on a page for another Elizabeth Sewell so therefore need to differentiate between the two. Please comment if you have any issues or comments. Thanks.--Gertrude206 (talk) 06:19, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * I created the article, and I'm perfectly OK with the proposed page move and new title. Thanks for asking. Finetooth (talk) 21:20, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Additional information
Elizabeth Sewell - not to be mixed up with her great-aunt, Elizabeth Missing Sewell, the other much earlier writer, - is considered to have written the classic work on Nonsense: The Field of Nonsense - Below is but one reference:

by PJ Lucas · 1991 — the author of the classic book on Nonsense, The Field of Nonsense. (London, 1952), considers "Nonsense Verse and the Child", in which quoting Lady Macbeth,

Interestingly, two of her more poignant essays, one contributed to the Hugh Kenner's contributory book on the event of TS Eliot's seventieth birthday, Elizabeth presents a convincing account that Eliot is essentially a Nonsense poet, the vein from which the rest of his work flows.. In a searing, much less flattering, really devastating analysis of Flannery O'Connor's work, forty years after Elizabeth published The Field of Nonsense, she clarifies and "reclassifies" Flannery's work in Nonsense terms. She places all the violence, cruelty, meanness in the fiction as well as Flannery's own words from her many letters in a frame that gives O'Connor a special category that soars above classic Nonsense into something sinister. For many at the time, Elizabeth's showed a fearlessness to take on and an eye for the cultural-deviated vantage point for an undisputed icon.

Furthermore, The Orphic Voice is a classic work in its own right... Very Original in her researching and clarifying the poetic method and placing it against the scientific method but arguing that the poetic is a science in the better sense of the word and superior for the qualities she outlines... Of her and that work, George Steiner places her in "that visionary company her work describes".

What's more, she wrote The Orphic Voice at the University of Manchester in the late 1950's, by way of the Simon Foundation... at the same time Michael Polyani, the great scientist and philosopher, was writing Personal Knowledge - He and his wife helped Elizabeth secure this coveted foundational award... She dedicated The Orphic Voice to Michael... They were lifelong friends... this scientist/philosopher and poet/metaphysician.

As a side note, Elizabeth was also a tutor for John Polanyi, Michael's son, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987.

Elizabeth helped found and directed the experimental college, Bensalem, in the late 1960's, a smaller school within Fordham University under the direction of Father MacLaughlin. It is considered to have not met its lofty purpose, for which Elizabeth writes an memoir, An Idea, in which she discusses the educational methodology and failure of the with Coleridge in a lonely house on a sea cliff... In the book's introduction, she suggests this method of thinking as a vehicle for literary criticism.

There is tons more about this brave and brilliant woman... for example, her Mississippi Poems written while living and teaching in that state in the 1960's during that period's dangerous activist/protest movement... She was an activist and humanitarian all her life.

Elizabeth Sewell might be considered one of the great poets and writers of the 20th century and was doing things even men could not quite accomplish when the doors were still quite jarred for them.

Elizabeth's father is a Wikipedia page scientist: R. B. Seymour Sewell -

Her father's family is quite famous... Elizabeth's four great-uncles and her great-aunt (already mentioned above) ...all five have Wikipedia pages... Her great-aunt wrote tons of books and one or her great-uncles was the first prime minster of New Zealand. See the Wiki pages below:

Elizabeth Missing Sewell - Richard Clarke Sewell -  William Sewell (author) - Henry Sewell - James Edwards Sewe ll

Some additional background: Elizabeth served for 3 or 4 years in her early 20's as a civil servant in the English Ministry of Education during the bombings of London during WWII. Later on she returned to Cambridge to complete her MA and Ph'D. Since the age of twelve Elizabeth had kyphosis, a hump on her back due to scoliosis, an ailment that was never corrected but which she bravely bore her entire life.

Elizabeth Sewell's work - her poetry and critical oeuvre - are considered prophetic and timely. She is ranked with Vico, Coleridge and Barfield, the later which attributed much learning to her, cited: "How Barfield Thought: The Creative Life of Owen Barfield," David Lavery.

Polanyi famously said that ES probably won't be discovered "for another 300 hundred years, much like Vico".

You have made a running start for which we are all very gratefully.

Many thanks,

Tom Carter Tripfornow (talk) 22:23, 22 April 2024 (UTC)