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.
In the letters West describes her own writing in contradistinction to that of high modernists. She told the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Arthur Crook
, in a letter of 24 December 1973:...
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, Apr. 1998, pp. 32-45.
34
but criticises it for relativism, artificiality, and lack of engagement with the real world. She credits Wyndham Lewis
for...
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
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, 1 June–30 Nov. 1983, pp. 45-70.
45
London under the bombing...
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)...
Textual Production
Dora Marsden
Assistant editors were Richard Aldington
and Leonard Compton-Rickett
, and later H. D.
(when Aldington went to war in June 1916) and T. S. Eliot
(from July 1917). Contributors of creative work and critical reviews...
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...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
VW
continued to write personal essays on a range of subjects, some weighty, some witty, but her literary and critical essays are the centre of her work in this genre. In these she wrote about...
Textual Production
Marianne Moore
In the early 1920s MM
was already an influential New York reviewer, who covered such landmark texts as T. S. Eliot
's The Sacred Wood, 1921, Bryher
's first novel, Development, also in...
Textual Production
Penelope Fitzgerald
The title may perhaps be quoted from the last line of T. S. Eliot
's The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which describes walking on the beach and hearing the mermaids' song, Till human...
Textual Production
Dorothy L. Sayers
The Friends of Canterbury Cathedral had commissioned T. S. Eliot
's Murder in the Cathedral in 1935.
Brabazon, James. Dorothy L. Sayers. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981.
161-2
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
The article formed the basis
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z. Facts on File, 1995.
168
of a paper titled Character in Fiction that VW
read to the Heretics Society
in Cambridge
on 18 May 1924. The paper was published, as Character in Fiction...
Textual Production
Q. D. Leavis
This suggests that QDL
had some part in F. R. Leavis's domination of the teaching of English at Cambridge
(through ideas linked to the schools of Practical Criticism and New Criticism), with his published works...
