Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Some critics felt that the novel's twist was a rotten, unfair trick. The London News Chronicle reviewer observed that it was a tasteless and unforgiving let-down by a writer we had grown to admire.But...
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...
Publishing
Wendy Cope
Many of these poems first appeared in newspapers and periodicals: the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Review, and so on, and one pseudonymously as a submission...
Intertextuality and Influence
Wendy Cope
The Muse Strikes Back does not show WC
answering in anger. Her poem to John Clare
(written for the John Clare Society
) is a celebration and a declaration of kinship: Awake in the early...
Literary responses
Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan
, however, applies a withering pen to WC
in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Friends, Associates
Nancy Cunard
Her boredom with this life (her mother's social milieu) was something that she shared with her friend Iris Tree
, also a poet. Despite her antipathy towards it, this life presented her with important literary...
Intertextuality and Influence
Nancy Cunard
The same company published Pound
and Eliot
(whose Prufrock is a pervasive presence in Cunard's first two collections). The title of this one strikes a note characteristic of her throughout her life. In later life...
Intertextuality and Influence
Nancy Cunard
The outlaws in question are lovers: he a demon lover, she a fearless woman. The writing here reflects a modernist love of allusion: it is, says Patrick McGuinness
, derivative in quite original ways. Sometimes...
Reception
Nancy Cunard
The reviews for this book were mixed. Amabel Williams-Ellis
said in The Spectator that the poems showed a permeating sense of effort not to be young lady-ish.
The poem is very much influenced by T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land, whose basic narrative structure it adopts: the poet-protagonist moves through city streets, calls up images of past and present, tries...
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...
Fictionalization
Nancy Cunard
NC
was cast as Iris March in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat, as Lucy Tantamount in Aldous Huxley
's Point Counter Point, as Baby Bucktrout in Wyndham Lewis
's The Roaring Queen...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Desai
AD
's work weaves together a wide range of cultural and literary references: the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgîtâ, as well as such European authors as E. M. Forster
, T. S. Eliot
, Dickinson
Textual Features
Anita Desai
Influenced by Eliot
's Four Quartets, Clear Light of Day deals with time as destroyer and preserver, and with what the bondage of time does to people.
Gopal, N. Raj. A Critical Study of the Novels of Anita Desai. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors.
90
It is structured as a four...
Occupation
John Donne
During the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries Donne's writings were largely forgotten or disapproved of. In June 1741 the London Magazine printed a regularised (to modern eyes butchered) version of Goe, and catche a...
