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.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Leisure and Society Sylvia Beach
T. S. Eliot made a special appearance at SB 's Shakespeare and Company to read The Waste Land and Burnt Norton to Les Amis de Shakespeare and Company .
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
364-5
Literary responses Radclyffe Hall
A number of writers rallied in support of RH . E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf drafted a letter protesting the suppression of The Well of Loneliness. Its signatories included Bernard Shaw , T. S. Eliot
Literary responses Edna St Vincent Millay
Edmund Wilson disliked this work, apparently because the communist in it is just as ridiculous as the stockbroker, so that no authoritative, authorized, left-wing voice is supplied.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
406
But its success was stunning.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
405
Literary responses Anne Ridler
When Anne Bradby (later AR ) plucked up courage to show some early poems to T. S. Eliot (though not requesting publication by Faber and Faber ), she was encouraged by his advice: I should...
Literary responses Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
When most women writers of her age were forgotten, the Countess of Pembroke retained a niche in literary history as a partner in the Sidneian psalms as well as the dedicatee of the Arcadia....
Literary responses James Joyce
T. S. Eliot praised the book in the Athenæum for 4 July 1919; Ezra Pound wrote to Joyce that Bloom is a great man; Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that the book reeled...
Literary responses Agatha Christie
Some critics felt that the novel's twist was a rotten, unfair trick. The London News Chronicle reviewer observed that it was a tasteless and unforgiving let-down by a writer we had grown to admire.But...
Literary responses Dorothy L. Sayers
Within Sayers's lifetime she had become a figure of controversy on account of the element of Christian partisanship in her non-fictional works. In The Emperor's Clothes, 1953, Kathleen Nott bracketed Sayers with T. S. Eliot
Literary responses Hope Mirrlees
Paris was received by an appreciative audience. Before its publication Virginia Woolf described it as very obscure, indecent, and brilliant.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
2: 385
As Julia Briggs observes, its readership remained strictly limited; [but] those, like T. S. Eliot
Literary responses Muriel Spark
This notice struck Eliotas one of the two or three most intelligent reviews
Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Constable.
203
he had had, and as quite extraordinary from someone who had seen the play but not yet had a chance...
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
Literary responses H. D.
T. S. Eliot wrote that HD's versions of these choruses were allowing for errors and even occasional omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English than those of the then renowned scholar...
Literary responses Jean Rhys
Critically, Rhys has been lauded as a modernist writer, a feminist writer, and, more recently, a postcolonial, Caribbean, or Creole writer. Biographer Carole Angier suggests that her preoccupation with exile was common in her time...
Literary responses Marianne Moore
Eliot assessed her in his introduction as the greatest living master of light rhyme, and as one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Her brother wrote of The...
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...

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