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.
Within Sayers's lifetime she had become a figure of controversy on account of the element of Christian partisanship in her non-fictional works. In The Emperor's Clothes, 1953, Kathleen Nott
bracketed Sayers with T. S. Eliot
Occupation
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
She served as the club's organizer and hostess. She intended it as a space where fledgling writers could gather and make contact with established authors. Her friend J. D. Beresford
, novelist, was the club's...
Occupation
Jo Shapcott
JS
began teaching English at Rolle College
in Exmouth (one of the three main campuses of the University of Plymouth
, which, however, is due to be relocated in a movement towards centralization). She then...
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...
At seventeen, she says (after the successive discoveries of Charlotte Brontë
, T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
), she began reading Rilke
. Everything opened up then, a whole new world of poetry for me.
Mslexia. Mslexia Publications.
47
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Shuttle
The first book that affected PS
deeply was Brontë
's Jane Eyre, with whose protagonist she identified.
Steffens, Daneet. “Penelope Shuttle”. Mslexia, No. 33, pp. 46-8.
48
At fifteen she read T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
and conceived a wish to be...
Textual Production
May Sinclair
MS
published in The Little ReviewPrufrock, and Other Observations: A Criticism, a favourable review and analysis of T. S. Eliot
's recent volume of poetry.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
265
Friends, Associates
May Sinclair
Her articles and critical reviews were encouraging for many writers, including T. S. Eliot
.
Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism. Indiana University Press.
According to biographer Suzanne Raitt
, MS
sometimes used aspects of her own experience in her stories. The Pin-Prick, 1915, about a young woman so sensitive that she kills herself in response to a...
Textual Features
May Sinclair
The piece on Flint links him with T. S. Eliot
by using terms similar to those which Sinclair had used in reviewing The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, praising him as a modern...
Literary responses
May Sinclair
Reviews were almost all positive.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
255
Writing in the Dial in September 1922, T. S. Eliot
used this novel as the most notable example of the psychoanalytical type which, however, he disapproved in principle. Its...
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
ES
had many friendships, and there were few notables in the artistic world whom she did not meet. Her friendships were quite volatile, with frequent quarrels, sometimes caused by the practical jokes and the heightened...
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
Muriel Spark
During the year 1951 MS
wrote another verse drama, this time parodic and satirical, aimed at T. S. Eliot
and Christopher Fry
: she called it The Cocktail's not for Drinking. It reached proof...
