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.
During her years at Bloomsbury, UR met the many distinguished literary figures who were either parishioners or readers at fund-raising events, like T. S. Eliot
, John Middleton Murry
, Edith Sitwell
, Wilfrid Meynell
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
T. S. Eliot
visited VW
and read The Waste Land to her from manuscript. She recorded in her diary her early impressions of the poem, which the Hogarth Press
published for the first time in...
Friends, Associates
Hope Mirrlees
T. S. Eliot
became a paying guest of HM
, her mother
, and her aunt
at their home in Surrey. He stayed here intermittently for several years, though he was usually in London...
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
ES
had many friendships, and there were few notables in the artistic world whom she did not meet. Her friendships were quite volatile, with frequent quarrels, sometimes caused by the practical jokes and the heightened...
Her brother was working for publishers George Bell
, and she met a number of authors, including Antonia White
and Margaret Kennedy
. Later, through her own work, she met with T. S. Eliot
's...
Health
Muriel Spark
Dexedrine was popular at the time as a dieting aid. Spark found letters becoming jumbled on the page as she was reading; she was on the hunt for theological interpretations in the writings of T. S. Eliot
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxix
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Intertextuality and Influence
Vita Sackville-West
It has an introspective strain, owed partly to its genesis in war: The rabble in the basement of our being, / Ragged and gaunt, that seldom rush to light.
As a teenager, EJ
read T. S. Eliot
and (as she put it) wrote long poems of sort of vers libre which I imagined were influenced by Eliot, and which were very personal, in fact...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Rendell
This text incorporates a number of unacknowledged literary allusions, such as a reference early on to T. S. Eliot
's lines from The Waste Land characterising April as the cruelest month.
Benstock, Bernard, and Thomas F. Staley, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 87. Gale Research.
309, 311
Intertextuality and Influence
Rose Tremain
Her dedicatee was a bookstore owner in Nashville, Tennessee, where he involved himself in the Civil Rights movement in 1960. (His son Richard
is known as a writer). RT
uses three epigraphs: from St John of the Cross
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Ridler
AR
wrote that the two great influences on her as a poet (because they helped her to find her own voice) were Sir Thomas Wyatt
and W. H. Auden
. Eliot
, too, was inescapable...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Drabble
After harking back to the days in which eminent authors were not public figures, she amusingly described the culture of public performance which arose during the 1960s. Highlights in her narrative were the first Writers'...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Ellen Harrison
JEH
's work exerted a palpable influence on the Modernist movement in literature, and both her persona and her life's work were represented, sometimes in much modified form, in many creative texts. Critic Julia Briggs