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.
Her dedicatee was a bookstore owner in Nashville, Tennessee, where he involved himself in the Civil Rights movement in 1960. (His son Richard
is known as a writer). RT
uses three epigraphs: from St John of the Cross
Residence
Violet Trefusis
Alice Keppel
financed her daughter VT
's move to the Manor House at West Coker in Somerset.
Violet visited at Coker Court in East Coker (a village made famous in literature by T. S. Eliot
Occupation
P. L. Travers
Her friend Æ
introduced her to the editor of this journal, A. R. Orage
. She also served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee, of which T. S. Eliot
too was a member.
Demers, Patricia. P.L. Travers. Twayne.
31
Haggarty, Ben. “Refining Nectar”. A Lively Oracle: A Centennial Celebration of P.L. Travers, Creator of Mary Poppins, edited by Ellen Dooling Draper and Jenny Koralek, Published for the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation by Larson Publications, pp. 19-24.
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Textual Production
Dylan Thomas
The publication was part of the prize offered by the Sunday Referee for the author of the best poem it had published that year. The previous year's winner had been Pamela Hansford Johnson
, currently...
Occupation
Algernon Charles Swinburne
ACS
is a major Victorian poet and a prominent member of the aesthetic movement (also known as art for art's sake) who enjoyed great popularity and influence. In several ways (his exploration of sexuality...
Here ASargues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment it opens the future to further change. Quoting from her own The...
Publishing
Gertrude Stein
GS
began her period of portraiture around 1908. Her portraits resembled biographical sketches but they were usually more impressionistic than factual.She thought that this genre allowed her to capture the immediacy of characters and to...
Textual Production
Gertrude Stein
Carl Van Vechten
edited and selected the texts to provide a sample of the various styles and periods of GS
's writings. He puts her in the same category as Joyce
, Eliot
, and...
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
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
MS
reviewed T. S. Eliot
's The Confidential Clerk (for the Church of England Newspaper) when it was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953. She found parallels in this play with her...
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
This notice struck Eliotas one of the two or three most intelligent reviews
he had had, and as quite extraordinary from someone who had seen the play but not yet had a chance...
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
During the year 1951 MS
wrote another verse drama, this time parodic and satirical, aimed at T. S. Eliot
and Christopher Fry
: she called it The Cocktail's not for Drinking. It reached proof...
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
The London theatre critics were scathing, with only two exceptions (though one of these, Harold Hobson
, carried a lot of weight). Pamela Hansford Johnson
trounced the play on the BBC
's radio programme The...