T. S. Eliot

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Akhmatova
In an introductory prose passage AA explains how the idea of the poem came to her. Three separate dedications hint at lovers in the past. (AA continued writing love poetry up to the end...
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...
politics Lady Cynthia Asquith
Though she was brought up in such a political milieu, Cynthia Charteris took no interest herself in politics (including the suffragist movement, in the context of which she thought militancy counter-productive). Even during the Second...
Education Diana Athill
DA was taught at home by governesses (seven successively before she was sent to school), who followed a correspondence course designed for home schooling which was known as Parents Educational National Union . A French...
Intertextuality and Influence Diana Athill
She opens on things she would like to do which age makes inappropriate or impossible: acquiring a puppy, or watch a tree-fern grow to maturity. (A postscript records that the tree-fern, discouragingly tiny when it...
Education Margaret Atwood
From 1957 she attended Victoria College , University of Toronto . Canadian publishing and the arts in Canada, broadly considered, had not yet recovered from the second world war. There were no cheap reprints of...
Intertextuality and Influence W. H. Auden
While an undergraduate at Oxford (from October 1925) he discovered T. S. Eliot , and was for a while obsessively modernist, as he had previously been traditional in the style of Thomas Hardy . He...
Textual Features W. H. Auden
It is no wonder than that Auden is an entertaining critic, with a penchant for the gnomic whether in titles (his essay on detective stories is called The Guilty Vicarage; his essay on Kafka
Publishing Djuna Barnes
DB had tried to find a publisher for Nightwood while she was living in New York, but the manuscript was turned down repeatedly. Emily Coleman suggested revisions, which Barnes carried out. Coleman also exploited literary...
Textual Production Djuna Barnes
Nightwood was published in New York in March 1937 by Harcourt Brace , with an introduction by Eliot praising its great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization...
Publishing Djuna Barnes
T. S. Eliot was once again instrumental in editing her manuscript and recommending it for publication with Faber and Faber . However, he wrote a blurb for the play which suggested frustration at DB 's...
Occupation Natalie Clifford Barney
Their goal was to offer financial backing to struggling writers such as T. S. Eliot and Paul Valéry , but the venture failed because Eliot was too embarrassed to accept the money, and Valéry secured...
Friends, Associates Natalie Clifford Barney
By the 1920s the salon attracted an impressive array of prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Paul Valéry , Colette , Jean Cocteau , Gabriele D'Annunzio , Rabindranath Tagore , Ernest Hemingway , F. Scott
Leisure and Society Sylvia Beach
T. S. Eliot made a special appearance at SB 's Shakespeare and Company to read The Waste Land and Burnt Norton to Les Amis de Shakespeare and Company .
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
364-5
Reception Sylvia Beach
Le Mercure de France published its homage to SB , with essays and poems by T. S. Eliot , Janet Flanner , André Gide , James Joyce , Gertrude Stein and others.
Mathews, Jackson, and Maurice Saillet. Sylvia Beach 1887-1962. Mercure de France.
cover and prelims

Timeline

1899: Arthur Symons published The Symbolist Movement...

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1899

Arthur Symons published The Symbolist Movement in Literature, with an epigraph from Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle .

1 January 1913: Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at...

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1 January 1913

Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury.

20 July 1915: The second and final issue of Wyndham Lewis's...

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20 July 1915

The second and final issue of Wyndham Lewis 's Vorticist magazine, Blast, included artwork and literary pieces by Helen Saunders , Jessie Dismorr , and Dorothy Shakespear , along with poems by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot .

December 1919: The last issue of The Egoist: An Individualist...

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December 1919

The last issue of The Egoist: An Individualist Review was published.

10 April 1925: US author F. Scott Fitzgerald published his...

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10 April 1925

US author F. Scott Fitzgerald published his novelThe Great Gatsby, which probes the consequences of success in the competitive pursuit of the great American dream. Zelda Fitzgerald came up with the title for...

After February 1932: An appeal of Count Potocki of Montalk's case...

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After February 1932

An appeal of Count Potocki of Montalk 's case was heard; and although he was not cleared, an advance in obscene libel cases was made.

Early 1936: The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by...

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Early 1936

The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts (who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot ), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...

1953: The Poetry Book Society was founded, largely...

Writing climate item

1953

The Poetry Book Society was founded, largely through the efforts of T. S. Eliot , to promote the reading of poetry.

Texts

Eliot, T. S. “Apology for the Countess of Pembroke”. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Faber and Faber, pp. 37-52.
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Faber and Faber, 1968.
Eliot, T. S. Collected poems, 1909-1935. Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1936.
Eliot, T. S. Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. Alfred A. Knopf.
Eliot, T. S. For Lancelot Andrewes. Faber and Gwyer, 1928.
Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. Harcourt, Brace.
Eliot, T. S., and Djuna Barnes. “Introduction”. Nightwood, Faber and Faber, 1950.
Eliot, T. S. Journey of the Magi. Faber and Gwyer.
Eliot, T. S. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. Faber and Faber.
Eliot, T. S., and T. S. Eliot. “La chanson d’amour de J. Alfred Prufrock”. Le Navire d’argent, translated by. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Maison des amis des livres.
Eliot, T. S. Murder in the Cathedral. Faber and Faber, 1936.
Eliot, T. S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Faber and Faber.
Eliot, T. S. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Faber and Faber.
Eliot, T. S. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Faber and Faber, 1943.
Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill”. The New Criterion, edited by T. S. Eliot, Vol.
4
, No. 1, pp. 32-45.
Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. Faber and Faber, 1957.
Eliot, T. S. Poems. Hogarth Press.
Eliot, T. S. Poems, 1909-1925. Faber and Gwyer.
Eliot, T. S. Prufrock and Other Observations. Egoist.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays, 1917-1932. Faber and Faber.
Moore, Marianne, and T. S. Eliot. Selected Poems. Macmillan, 1935.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose. Editor Hayward, John Davy, Penguin, 1963.
Eliot, T. S. Sweeney Agonistes. Faber and Faber.
Eliot, T. S. The Cocktail Party. Faber and Faber, 1950.
Eliot, T. S. The Confidential Clerk. Faber and Faber, 1954.