Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
T. S. Eliot
-
Standard Name: Eliot, T. S.
Used Form: Thomas Stearns Eliot
TSE
, an American settled in England, was the dominant voice in English poetry during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as an immensely influential critic. His early experimental poems excel at catching an atmosphere or mood, often a moment of stasis and self-doubt. The Waste Land, a brilliant collage of fragments, has been seen to express the fears of a whole society about the threatened end of culture and amenity called civilization. After Eliot's conversion to Christianity his poetry moved to sombre investigations of the spiritual life: of time, fate, decision, guilt, and reconciliation. Meanwhile his criticism grappled with the the relation of past to present in terms of the contemporary relationship to tradition. TSE
also wrote lively comic verse, and in theatrical writing he moved on from pageant and historical religious drama to symbolic representation of spiritual issues through events in banal daily life.
MS
reviewed T. S. Eliot
's The Confidential Clerk (for the Church of England Newspaper) when it was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953. She found parallels in this play with her...
Textual Production
Denise Levertov
From the age of about seven DL
had a sense of vocation, thinking of herself as an artist-person and as having a destiny. She aspired after fame from the time that she first read...
Textual Production
Edna St Vincent Millay
The Cult of the Occult was a group of poems which ESVM
wrote as a satire on T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
493-4
Textual Production
Dorothy L. Sayers
The Friends of Canterbury Cathedral had commissioned T. S. Eliot
's Murder in the Cathedral in 1935.
Brabazon, James. Dorothy L. Sayers. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
161-2
Textual Production
H. D.
Even when she had entirely taken over her husband's editorial position, his name continued to appear as editor on the journal's masthead until June 1917 (which was when she too left the journal, handing her...
Textual Production
Maureen Duffy
MD
's website features a series of poems indignantly addressed to William Langland
, author of Piers Plowman, of behalf of the new, unacknowledged poor. The New Vision of Piers Plowless sets the scene:...
Textual Production
Marianne Moore
MM
published her Selected Poems, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot
, who also suggested the order of the poems printed here.
Abbott, Craig S. Marianne Moore: A Descriptive Bibliography. University of Pittsburgh Press.
14-16
Moore, Marianne. “Introduction”. The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman, Faber, p. xix - xxx.
xix
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marghanita Laski
ML
defines ecstasy as experiences that are joyful, transitory, unexpected, rare, valued, and extraordinary to the point of often seeming as if derived from a praeternatural source.
Laski, Marghanita. Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences. Cresset Press.
5
An ecstatic state is one in which...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Laura Riding
Although this volume appeared later, its second chapter was the root of the concluding chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Gertrude Stein
is a test case here: T. S. Eliot
is hauled over...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Stevenson
Here ASargues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment it opens the future to further change. Quoting from her own The...
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
114
LR
sets out to free the poet from the restrictions imposed by the synthetic or collective notion...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Virginia Woolf
Character in Fiction, the further essay which emerged from Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, is reflective, philosophical, fictional, its tone assertive, witty, ironical, and serious. It ranges
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Editors McNeillie, Andrew and Stuart Nelson Clarke, Hogarth Press.
3: 421
living writers into two...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jeanette Winterson
In these essays JW
defends the power and importance of art, and the necessity of difficult art, discusses the works of Virginia Woolf
, T. S. Eliot
, and Gertrude Stein
, and explores her...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Nancy Cunard
Making their first appearance in print are poems written for Valentine Ackland
and for Nina Hamnett
, and NC
's elegy for Eliot
, written a few weeks after his death and only two months...
Wealth and Poverty
Sylvia Beach
Eleanor Beach
fully supported her daughter's dream of owning a bookstore. She worked with her broker to get SB
the necessary $3,000 (24,810 francs) in August 1919 in order to start the business.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
