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.
These volumes were milestones in the development of English modernism, posing a serious challenge to the poetic orthodoxies of the day, through verbal music, incongruous imagery, and a touch of surrealism, rather than the understatement...
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Denise Levertov
From the age of about seven DL
had a sense of vocation, thinking of herself as an artist-person and as having a destiny. She aspired after fame from the time that she first read...
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Edna St Vincent Millay
The Cult of the Occult was a group of poems which ESVM
wrote as a satire on T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
493-4
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Dorothy L. Sayers
The Friends of Canterbury Cathedral had commissioned T. S. Eliot
's Murder in the Cathedral in 1935.
Brabazon, James. Dorothy L. Sayers. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
161-2
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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...
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Maureen Duffy
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:...
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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
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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 Features
H. D.
This is war poetry which looks at the home front, like T. S. Eliot
's Four Quartets and Ezra Pound
's Pisan Cantos. It has been classified as epic.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “’Remembering Shakespeare Always, But Remembering Him Differently’: H.D.’s By Avon River”. Sagetrieb, Vol.
2
, No. 2, pp. 45-70.
45
London under the bombing...
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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...
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Seamus Heaney
Setting out to enable his readers to witness the spectacle of a gifted writer becoming a definitive one, he begins by considering poetic theories of sound and meaning held by Frost
, Eliot
, and...
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Dora Marsden
Marsden was neither unaware nor entirely appreciative of Pound's intellectual programme or his professional ethics. She told Weaver
in a letter of November 1913 (after the journal had again been relaunched with a new name)...
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Christine Brooke-Rose
A study of the ways in which metaphor functions grammatically, this text analyses a range of works by writers including Chaucer
, Donne
, Yeats
, and Eliot
: all but Chaucer were added since...
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Rebecca West
In the letters West describes her own writing in contradistinction to that of high modernists. She told the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Arthur Crook
, in a letter of 24 December 1973:...
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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
