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.
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...