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.
The publication was part of the prize offered by the Sunday Referee for the author of the best poem it had published that year. The previous year's winner had been Pamela Hansford Johnson
, currently...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Textual Production
Anne Ridler
AR
's fourth book of poetry was called The Golden Bird, and Other Poems, and included a sonnet written for T. S. Eliot
on his sixtieth birthday.
Backscheider, Paula R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 27. Gale Research.
27: 300
Textual Production
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
followed her Behn biography two years later with Andrew Marvell, to open Faber and Faber
's series The Poets on the Poets (in which the second volume was provided by Eliot
writing on Dante
).
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
222
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jennings
EJ
titled another poetry volume, Consequently I Rejoice, with words from T. S. Eliot
's Ash Wednesday, quoting the context of the phrase as an epigraph.
British Book News. British Council.
(1977): May insert
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.
Textual Production
Kathleen Raine
Early in her career KR
was known as a commentator on contemporary or near-contemporary, modernist poetry: a volume of her reviews written between January 1941 and March 1951 was published in 2002 as Defining the...
Textual Production
Mary Butts
Her efforts to find a publisher for this novel did not meet with success until September 1927.
Wormald, Mark. “Not to be forgotten”. Times Literary Supplement, pp. 10-12.
10
In a journal entry that year she lamented how the novel might well have been called The...
Textual Production
Doris Lessing
DL
published, in London and New York, her first novel, The Grass is Singing.
The idyllic sound of the novel's title is belied by its context in T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land...
Textual Features
Betty Miller
Modernist in style, the book is divided into four sections: Breakfast Time, Lunch Time, Tea Time, and Dinner Time. Though these titles are uncompromisingly human-centric, the London house in Westbourne Grove...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jennings
Every Changing Shape was reprinted in 1996 by Carcanet Press
with a foreword by Michael Schmidt
. It collects essays on Christian writers and mystics that address the way that faith informs the creative imagination...
Textual Features
Mary Butts
In this essay Butts has some praise for Old Bloomsbury, particularly Lytton Strachey
,
Butts, Mary. “Bloomsbury”. Modernism/Modernity, edited by Camilla Bagg et al., Vol.
5
, No. 2, pp. 32-45.
34
but criticises it for relativism, artificiality, and lack of engagement with the real world. She credits Wyndham Lewis
for...
Her introduction to the first selection, she said later, was more influenced by Coleridge
than by Charles Williams
.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, p. 240 pp.
96
It was an important feature of the volume, ranging itself alongside such prestigious Shakespeare critics...
Textual Features
H. D.
This is war poetry which looks at the home front, like T. S. Eliot
's Four Quartets and Ezra Pound
's Pisan Cantos. It has been classified as epic.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “’Remembering Shakespeare Always, But Remembering Him Differently’: H.D.’s By Avon River”. Sagetrieb, Vol.
2
, No. 2, pp. 45-70.
45
London under the bombing...
Textual Features
Philip Larkin
His selection was resolutely unfashionable, favouring Hardy
and Betjeman
at the expense of Eliot
and Pound
. He was, however, remarkably generous in his selection of women poets (often for just one or two poems...
