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.
RP
knew T. S. Eliot
well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
Textual Production
Ruth Pitter
In 1936 RP
and Michael Head
had published The Matron Cat's Song, for which she wrote the lyric and he the music. (In 1972 Beryl Price
published musical settings for A Cycle of Cats...
In the spring of 1922, he and Barney began a short-lived project called Bel Esprit in an attempt to raise funds for struggling writers such as T. S. Eliot
(who ultimately refused their help).
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxix
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
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...
Textual Production
Ezra Pound
For many readers of poetry, Pound's greatest achievement remains the revisions which he instigated in Eliot
's The Waste Land, which led Eliot himself to dedicate the poem to his friend as il miglior...
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
Literary responses
Ann Quin
Berg earned AQ
two major awards: the Harkness Fellowship, given to the most promising Commonwealth artist under thirty years, and the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship from the University of New Mexico
.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
KR
knew as a child that poetry was her vocation. Her mother wrote down her poems before she could hold a pencil herself.
Watts, Janet. “Kathleen Raine”. The Guardian, p. 25.
25
As an undergraduate she had poems published by William Empson
in...
Literary responses
Kathleen Raine
KR
longed vainly to be published by Eliot at Faber; by the time that she heard from Yeats
's daughter, years later, that he had first read her at the recommendation of Eliot
, she...
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...
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
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...
Literary responses
Jean Rhys
Critically, Rhys has been lauded as a modernist writer, a feminist writer, and, more recently, a postcolonial, Caribbean, or Creole writer. Biographer Carole Angier suggests that her preoccupation with exile was common in her time...
