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 play opened in Cambridge because the Royal Court
, despite their earlier supportiveness, wanted to test the waters before staging another Jellicoe play in London. AJ
credits John Osborne
for persuading them to produce...
Mathews, Jackson, and Maurice Saillet. Sylvia Beach 1887-1962. Mercure de France.
cover and prelims
Reception
Muriel Spark
Spark was horrified when Derek Stanford
, her former friend and collaborator, published a book about her in September 1963: Muriel Spark, a Biographical and Critical Study, which she later called packed with factual...
Reception
Anne Ridler
AR
later wrote that Who is My Neighbour? was of course derivative from Eliot
.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, p. 240 pp.
196
Reception
Nancy Cunard
The reviews for this book were mixed. Amabel Williams-Ellis
said in The Spectator that the poems showed a permeating sense of effort not to be young lady-ish.
Alice Keppel
financed her daughter VT
's move to the Manor House at West Coker in Somerset.
Violet visited at Coker Court in East Coker (a village made famous in literature by T. S. Eliot
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...
Textual Features
Anne Ridler
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...
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...
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
Setting out to enable his readers to witness the spectacle of a gifted writer becoming a definitive one, he begins by considering poetic theories of sound and meaning held by Frost
, Eliot
, and...
Textual Features
Dora Marsden
Marsden was neither unaware nor entirely appreciative of Pound's intellectual programme or his professional ethics. She told Weaver
in a letter of November 1913 (after the journal had again been relaunched with a new name)...
