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.
After harking back to the days in which eminent authors were not public figures, she amusingly described the culture of public performance which arose during the 1960s. Highlights in her narrative were the first Writers'...
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:...
Literary responses
William Empson
The book was a resounding success, widely recommended by T. S. Eliot
in Britain and by John Crowe Ransom
in the USA.
Kermode, Frank. “The Savage Life”. London Review of Books, pp. 3-5.
3
Education
Ruth Fainlight
At school she adored reading Milton
, and used to walk around chanting Eliot
to myself: Every streetlamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum. from hisRhapsody on a Windy Night.
Evans-Bush, Katy. “The Poet Realized. An Interview with Ruth Fainlight”. Contemporary Poetry Review.
But...
Education
Elaine Feinstein
She later felt she was lucky to be a postwar student; before then, she would have been as out of place at Newnham as Amy Levy
. Christianity was everywhere
Feinstein, Elaine. It Goes with the Territory. Alma.
37
in the syllabus and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Ferrar
The hold exerted on T. S. Eliot
's imagination by Little Gidding seems to have been produced by the idea of the community, not by their texts. His poem Little Gidding gives little hint that...
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
Sir James George Frazer
The Golden Bough, a comparative study of human beliefs from the earliest times, had a major influence on modernist writings. SJGF
's text outlines an evolving belief system, which moves from magic, to religion...
Textual Production
Monica Furlong
MF
published The End of Our Exploring, a work about the spiritual life titled from T. S. Eliot
's Little Gidding, and dedicated to the memory of her father, Alfred Furlong
.
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.
Furlong, Monica. The End of Our Exploring. Hodder and Stoughton.
prelims
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted in Travelling In a host of quotations from old and new sources: from studies in Zen Buddhism
, the Tao te Ching, the Theologica Germanica, and Julian of Norwich
Publishing
Stella Gibbons
SG
's poem The Giraffes appeared in the Criterion, the literary magazine founded and edited by T. S. Eliot
.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury.
50
Intertextuality and Influence
Rumer Godden
A Fugue in Time has three epigraphs: a description of the simultaneous, independent melodies present in Bach
's fugues; eighteen lines from T. S. Eliot
's still fairly recent East Coker (from Home is where...
Textual Features
Graham Greene
His work was heavily influenced by that of T. S. Eliot
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine Greer
The chapters are headed with quotations ranging eclectically through the international canon and counter-canon from Sophocles
and The Ramayana of Valmiki (an ancient Indian epic) to Spike Milligan
, via Charles Baudelaire
, T. S. Eliot
