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 Author name Excerpt
Wealth and Poverty Sylvia Beach
Eleanor Beach fully supported her daughter's dream of owning a bookstore. She worked with her broker to get SB the necessary $3,000 (24,810 francs) in August 1919 in order to start the business.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
38
SB
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Marghanita Laski
ML defines ecstasy as experiences that are joyful, transitory, unexpected, rare, valued, and extraordinary to the point of often seeming as if derived from a praeternatural source.
Laski, Marghanita. Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences. Cresset Press.
5
An ecstatic state is one in which...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Laura Riding
Although this volume appeared later, its second chapter was the root of the concluding chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Gertrude Stein is a test case here: T. S. Eliot is hauled over...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Stevenson
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Laura Riding
The volume was, says Elizabeth Friedmann , largely a response to the ideas of Wyndham Lewis .
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
114
LR sets out to free the poet from the restrictions imposed by the synthetic or collective notion...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Virginia Woolf
Character in Fiction, the further essay which emerged from Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, is reflective, philosophical, fictional, its tone assertive, witty, ironical, and serious. It ranges
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Editors McNeillie, Andrew and Stuart Nelson Clarke, Hogarth Press.
3: 421
living writers into two...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jeanette Winterson
In these essays JW defends the power and importance of art, and the necessity of difficult art, discusses the works of Virginia Woolf , T. S. Eliot , and Gertrude Stein , and explores her...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Nancy Cunard
Making their first appearance in print are poems written for Valentine Ackland and for Nina Hamnett , and NC 's elegy for Eliot , written a few weeks after his death and only two months...
Textual Production Flannery O'Connor
As the thesis for her Master of Fine Arts degree, FOC submitted a collection of six pieces: The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories, dedicated to Paul Engle . Its title is one of...
Textual Production Edith Sitwell
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...
Textual Production Ada Leverson
AL wrote to T. S. Eliot (editor of The Criterion) offering him an essay on Wilde , something on Proust , and a short story, The Consultation.
Wyndham, Violet. The Sphinx and Her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson 1862-1933. A. Deutsch.
93
Textual Production Hope Mirrlees
HM published A Fly in Amber: Being an Extravagant Biography of the Romantic Antiquary Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. It was published through Faber and Faber , who obtained it through HM 's old friend T. S. Eliot .
Henig, Suzanne. “Queen of Lud: Hope Mirrlees”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
1
, No. 1, pp. 8-27.
8
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...
Textual Production 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...
Textual Production 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

Timeline

1899: Arthur Symons published The Symbolist Movement...

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1899

Arthur Symons published The Symbolist Movement in Literature, with an epigraph from Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle .

1 January 1913: Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at...

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1 January 1913

Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury.

20 July 1915: The second and final issue of Wyndham Lewis's...

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20 July 1915

The second and final issue of Wyndham Lewis 's Vorticist magazine, Blast, included artwork and literary pieces by Helen Saunders , Jessie Dismorr , and Dorothy Shakespear , along with poems by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot .

December 1919: The last issue of The Egoist: An Individualist...

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December 1919

The last issue of The Egoist: An Individualist Review was published.

10 April 1925: US author F. Scott Fitzgerald published his...

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10 April 1925

US author F. Scott Fitzgerald published his novelThe Great Gatsby, which probes the consequences of success in the competitive pursuit of the great American dream. Zelda Fitzgerald came up with the title for...

After February 1932: An appeal of Count Potocki of Montalk's case...

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After February 1932

An appeal of Count Potocki of Montalk 's case was heard; and although he was not cleared, an advance in obscene libel cases was made.

Early 1936: The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by...

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Early 1936

The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts (who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot ), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...

1953: The Poetry Book Society was founded, largely...

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1953

The Poetry Book Society was founded, largely through the efforts of T. S. Eliot , to promote the reading of poetry.

Texts

Eliot, T. S. “Apology for the Countess of Pembroke”. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Faber and Faber, pp. 37-52.
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Faber and Faber, 1968.
Eliot, T. S. Collected poems, 1909-1935. Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1936.
Eliot, T. S. Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. Alfred A. Knopf.
Eliot, T. S. For Lancelot Andrewes. Faber and Gwyer, 1928.
Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. Harcourt, Brace.
Eliot, T. S., and Djuna Barnes. “Introduction”. Nightwood, Faber and Faber, 1950.
Eliot, T. S. Journey of the Magi. Faber and Gwyer.
Eliot, T. S. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. Faber and Faber.
Eliot, T. S., and T. S. Eliot. “La chanson d’amour de J. Alfred Prufrock”. Le Navire d’argent, translated by. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Maison des amis des livres.
Eliot, T. S. Murder in the Cathedral. Faber and Faber, 1936.
Eliot, T. S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Faber and Faber.
Eliot, T. S. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Faber and Faber.
Eliot, T. S. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Faber and Faber, 1943.
Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill”. The New Criterion, edited by T. S. Eliot, Vol.
4
, No. 1, pp. 32-45.
Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. Faber and Faber, 1957.
Eliot, T. S. Poems. Hogarth Press.
Eliot, T. S. Poems, 1909-1925. Faber and Gwyer.
Eliot, T. S. Prufrock and Other Observations. Egoist.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays, 1917-1932. Faber and Faber.
Moore, Marianne, and T. S. Eliot. Selected Poems. Macmillan, 1935.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose. Editor Hayward, John Davy, Penguin, 1963.
Eliot, T. S. Sweeney Agonistes. Faber and Faber.
Eliot, T. S. The Cocktail Party. Faber and Faber, 1950.
Eliot, T. S. The Confidential Clerk. Faber and Faber, 1954.