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.
The novel contains particularly sophisticated subplots, including the intense rivalry between Burden's teenaged children, and Elizabeth's and Wexford's parallel fears of growing old. As usual in RR
's work, the novel gives an important role...
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
Michelene Wandor
It proclaims: this is the story of two people // this is the story of two peoples // and one God / your God or mine?
Wandor, Michelene. The Music of the Prophets. Arc Publications.
34
In tracing the story to before the Act...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hope Mirrlees
HM
observed that Paris was deeply influenced by Cocteau
's poem Le Cape de Bonne Espérance. It also is replete with literary and other allusions apart from Cocteau.
Henig, Suzanne. “Queen of Lud: Hope Mirrlees”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
1
, No. 1, pp. 8-27.
13
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Though it is frequently read...
Intertextuality and Influence
Julian of Norwich
T. S. Eliot
used Julian's words and concepts for the final lines of Little Gidding. Iris Murdoch
claimed her as an influence. She is the subject of a video by Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Intertextuality and Influence
Evelyn Waugh
In this novel titled from T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land, Waugh traces Tony Last, like others of his protagonists, from materially and socially comfortable but spiritually arid life in England, out...
Intertextuality and Influence
Agatha Christie
The title is taken from an image in Eliot
's Little Gidding (published six years before). Set in Cornwall in 1945, the story presents the political climate of the immediate postwar era through a narrator...
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.
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
Friends, Associates
Ruth Pitter
RP
knew T. S. Eliot
well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Shaw Weaver
As editor, HSW
attempted to recruit Storm Jameson
for the paper, but Jameson unhappily could not accept a full-time position. She also began to acquaint herself with contributors, such as H. D.
, whom she...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
Leonard Woolf wrote to Eliot, whose Prufrock and Other Observations he had read, to invite him to send some work to the Hogarth Press
. The letter led to a meeting, and ultimately to the...
Friends, Associates
Marianne Moore
MM
corresponded with T. S. Eliot
from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D.
and of Bryher
, and her editors believe that every one of her five...
Friends, Associates
Hannah Arendt
HA
's journalistic and editorial work meant that she met almost everyone who belonged to the intellectual scene in New York, as well as those just passing through, like T. S. Eliot
. Those who...
Friends, Associates
Cecily Mackworth
Her literary circle in Paris was highly eclectic: the many camps in which she had friends included the Surrealist rump, the incoming Existentialists, and the Communists (who were mostly ex-Surrealists).
