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.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sylvia Kantaris
Other poems are self-referential examinations of poetry and writing. The Recluse describes the inability of the contemporary poet to present in verse (like the unnamed William Wordsworth
) the rustic tale of a chance-met old...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sylvia Beach
Eliot
later affirmed that he owed them thanks for the introduction of [his] verse to French readers.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
187
Intertextuality and Influence
Wendy Cope
The Muse Strikes Back does not show WC
answering in anger. Her poem to John Clare
(written for the John Clare Society
) is a celebration and a declaration of kinship: Awake in the early...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ethel Mannin
Ragged Banners also addresses questions of genre. The text includes an index which lists on the one hand names of notable literary figures (including Ethel M. Dell
, T. S. Eliot
, and Shakespeare
...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Nancy Cunard
The same company published Pound
and Eliot
(whose Prufrock is a pervasive presence in Cunard's first two collections). The title of this one strikes a note characteristic of her throughout her life. In later life...
Intertextuality and Influence
Diana Athill
She opens on things she would like to do which age makes inappropriate or impossible: acquiring a puppy, or watch a tree-fern grow to maturity. (A postscript records that the tree-fern, discouragingly tiny when it...
