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.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
364-5
Intertextuality and Influence
Vita Sackville-West
It has an introspective strain, owed partly to its genesis in war: The rabble in the basement of our being, / Ragged and gaunt, that seldom rush to light.
As a teenager, EJ
read T. S. Eliot
and (as she put it) wrote long poems of sort of vers libre which I imagined were influenced by Eliot, and which were very personal, in fact...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Rendell
This text incorporates a number of unacknowledged literary allusions, such as a reference early on to T. S. Eliot
's lines from The Waste Land characterising April as the cruelest month.
Benstock, Bernard, and Thomas F. Staley, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 87. Gale Research.
309, 311
Intertextuality and Influence
Rose Tremain
Her dedicatee was a bookstore owner in Nashville, Tennessee, where he involved himself in the Civil Rights movement in 1960. (His son Richard
is known as a writer). RT
uses three epigraphs: from St John of the Cross
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Ridler
AR
wrote that the two great influences on her as a poet (because they helped her to find her own voice) were Sir Thomas Wyatt
and W. H. Auden
. Eliot
, too, was inescapable...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Drabble
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'...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Ellen Harrison
JEH
's work exerted a palpable influence on the Modernist movement in literature, and both her persona and her life's work were represented, sometimes in much modified form, in many creative texts. Critic Julia Briggs
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Rendell
The novel contains particularly sophisticated subplots, including the intense rivalry between Burden's teenaged children, and Elizabeth's and Wexford's parallel fears of growing old. As usual in RR
's work, the novel gives an important role...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hope Mirrlees
HM
observed that Paris was deeply influenced by Cocteau
's poem Le Cape de Bonne Espérance. It also is replete with literary and other allusions apart from Cocteau.
Henig, Suzanne. “Queen of Lud: Hope Mirrlees”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
1
, No. 1, pp. 8-27.
13
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Though it is frequently read...
Intertextuality and Influence
Michelene Wandor
It proclaims: this is the story of two people // this is the story of two peoples // and one God / your God or mine?
Wandor, Michelene. The Music of the Prophets. Arc Publications.
34
In tracing the story to before the Act...
Intertextuality and Influence
Julian of Norwich
T. S. Eliot
used Julian's words and concepts for the final lines of Little Gidding. Iris Murdoch
claimed her as an influence. She is the subject of a video by Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Intertextuality and Influence
Evelyn Waugh
In this novel titled from T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land, Waugh traces Tony Last, like others of his protagonists, from materially and socially comfortable but spiritually arid life in England, out...
Intertextuality and Influence
Agatha Christie
The title is taken from an image in Eliot
's Little Gidding (published six years before). Set in Cornwall in 1945, the story presents the political climate of the immediate postwar era through a narrator...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Akhmatova
In an introductory prose passage AA
explains how the idea of the poem came to her. Three separate dedications hint at lovers in the past. (AA
continued writing love poetry up to the end...
