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.
EJ
titled another poetry volume, Consequently I Rejoice, with words from T. S. Eliot
's Ash Wednesday, quoting the context of the phrase as an epigraph.
British Book News. British Council.
(1977): May insert
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Jennings
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...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jennings
Every Changing Shape was reprinted in 1996 by Carcanet Press
with a foreword by Michael Schmidt
. It collects essays on Christian writers and mystics that address the way that faith informs the creative imagination...
Literary responses
James Joyce
T. S. Eliot
praised the book in the Athenæum for 4 July 1919; Ezra Pound
wrote to Joyce that Bloom is a great man; Virginia Woolf
wrote in her diary that the book reeled...
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
Sylvia Kantaris
Other poems are self-referential examinations of poetry and writing. The Recluse describes the inability of the contemporary poet to present in verse (like the unnamed William Wordsworth
) the rustic tale of a chance-met old...
Textual Features
Philip Larkin
His selection was resolutely unfashionable, favouring Hardy
and Betjeman
at the expense of Eliot
and Pound
. He was, however, remarkably generous in his selection of women poets (often for just one or two poems...
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...
Textual Production
Q. D. Leavis
This volume contains four lectures given by the Leavises at Harvard
and Cornell
, three of which are by F. R. Leavis: Luddites? or, There is Only One Culture, Eliot
's Classical Standing...
Singh, G., and Q. D. Leavis. F.R. Leavis: A Literary Biography. Duckworth.
283-4
Family and Intimate relationships
Q. D. Leavis
Though both husband and wife were to influential, F. R. Leavis became one of the leading literary critics of the twentieth century. A dynamic speaker and teacher, he was known for his uncompromising, exclusive, often...
Occupation
Q. D. Leavis
QDL
spoke on A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights (later published as an essay), while her husband's topics included Eliot
and Yeats
.
Singh, G., and Q. D. Leavis. F.R. Leavis: A Literary Biography. Duckworth.
127
Literary responses
Q. D. Leavis
Fiction and the Reading Public was widely reviewed. In the Criterion of July 1932, T. S. Eliot
commended its argument: A society which does not recognize the existence of art is barbaric. But a society...
Textual Production
Q. D. Leavis
This suggests that QDL
had some part in F. R. Leavis's domination of the teaching of English at Cambridge
(through ideas linked to the schools of Practical Criticism and New Criticism), with his published works...
Literary responses
Vernon Lee
Lee's work had a highly mixed reception. It was praised by Pater: in a footnote added to the third edition of his Renaissance, he calls Euphoriona work abounding in knowledge and insights on...
