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
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...
Literary responses Dorothy Richardson
H. G. Wells , reviewing this work, wrote that DR had probably carried impressionism in fiction to its furthest limit. He considered that her percepts never become concepts, and that her heroine is not a...
Literary responses Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan , however, applies a withering pen to WC in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Literary responses Cecily Mackworth
T. S. Eliot , an early and appreciative reader of this book, invited the author to meet him over tea at his Faber and Faber office in Russell Square. Mackworth, however, felt intimidated by...
Literary responses Jo Shapcott
John Kinsella 's initial review called JS as a great satirist and a virtuoso in meaning and verse movement, one who is doing no less than rewriting the English poetic canon—challenging sources, verse structure and...
Literary responses Anne Ridler
AR later judged that her dialogue was pretty good but her technical capacity unequal to her ambitious theme.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, p. 240 pp.
146
The play was well received on opening night and throughout its run; Eliot was enthusiastic, and...
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
Though he had accepted it for publication, Eliot had initially expressed little enthusiasm for this essay.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
3: 49
Hilary Mantel , reading this essay while very ill herself, indignantly rejected what she saw as Woolf's...
Literary responses Laura Riding
Allen Tate praised the volume in the New Republic, prophesying a brilliant future for Riding. When John Gould Fletcher in The Criterion called her poems derivative, Graves wrote to criticise both Fletcher for being...
Literary responses Harriet Shaw Weaver
In 1932Eliot dedicated his Selected Essays to HSW : in gratitude and in recognition of her services to English letters.
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking.
314n
Critic Percy Muir remarked at a National Book League celebration of James Joyce
Literary responses Ezra Pound
Ella Wheeler Wilcox , a family friend, wrote a warm review for the American Journal Examiner, translating the title as With Tapers Quenched, and concluding: Success to you, young singer in Venice!The...
Literary responses Q. D. Leavis
Fiction and the Reading Public was widely reviewed. In the Criterion of July 1932, T. S. Eliot commended its argument: A society which does not recognize the existence of art is barbaric. But a society...
Literary responses A. E. Housman
At AEH 's death Virginia Woolf wrote that although she had personal reservations about his muse—Always too laden with a peculiar scent for my taste. May, death, lads, Shropshire—
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
6: 33
he had...
Literary responses Ezra Pound
Monroe later added, I can't pretend to be much pleased at the course his verse is taking. A hint from Browning at his most recondite, and erudition in seventeen languages.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
5
The same year Eliot
Leisure and Society Dorothy L. Sayers
Other speakers in this series included T. S. Eliot and Lady Rhondda .

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