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.
MD
's website features a series of poems indignantly addressed to William Langland
, author of Piers Plowman, of behalf of the new, unacknowledged poor. The New Vision of Piers Plowless sets the scene:...
Textual Production
Marianne Moore
MM
published her Selected Poems, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot
, who also suggested the order of the poems printed here.
Abbott, Craig S. Marianne Moore: A Descriptive Bibliography. University of Pittsburgh Press.
14-16
Moore, Marianne. “Introduction”. The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman, Faber, p. xix - xxx.
xix
Textual Production
H. D.
Even when she had entirely taken over her husband's editorial position, his name continued to appear as editor on the journal's masthead until June 1917 (which was when she too left the journal, handing her...
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...
Textual Production
Rose Macaulay
The title opens an epigraph of three lines of poetry attributed to Anon but actually written by RM
herself. T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land supplied another epigraph.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, p. 240 pp.
141
Textual Production
Ruth Pitter
In 1936 RP
and Michael Head
had published The Matron Cat's Song, for which she wrote the lyric and he the music. (In 1972 Beryl Price
published musical settings for A Cycle of Cats...
Textual Production
Marianne Moore
In the early 1920s MM
was already an influential New York reviewer, who covered such landmark texts as T. S. Eliot
's The Sacred Wood, 1921, Bryher
's first novel, Development, also in...
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Sylvia Beach
Though the essays were solicited and overseen by Joyce
, SB
did much of the editorial work and designed the cover.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace.
White argues that Moore was essentially two separate poets, pre- and post-World War Two. She chooses to present the earlier one of the two, the poet whom Eliot
, Stevens
, Williams
, and Bishop
Textual Production
Seamus Heaney
Sweeney was a legendary king of Ireland who ran mad and was transformed into a bird. He is famous for his poetry and his madness. In literary terms he calls to mind the Irish writer...
VW
continued to write personal essays on a range of subjects, some weighty, some witty, but her literary and critical essays are the centre of her work in this genre. In these she wrote about...
Textual Production
Penelope Fitzgerald
The title may perhaps be quoted from the last line of T. S. Eliot
's The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which describes walking on the beach and hearing the mermaids' song, Till human...
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...
