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 outlaws in question are lovers: he a demon lover, she a fearless woman. The writing here reflects a modernist love of allusion: it is, says Patrick McGuinness
, derivative in quite original ways. Sometimes...
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...
While an undergraduate at Oxford (from October 1925) he discovered T. S. Eliot
, and was for a while obsessively modernist, as he had previously been traditional in the style of Thomas Hardy
. He...
Intertextuality and Influence
Nancy Cunard
The poem is very much influenced by T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land, whose basic narrative structure it adopts: the poet-protagonist moves through city streets, calls up images of past and present, tries...
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted in Travelling In a host of quotations from old and new sources: from studies in Zen Buddhism
, the Tao te Ching, the Theologica Germanica, and Julian of Norwich
Intertextuality and Influence
Laura Riding
Reviews were good in the main. Not only did LR
's friend and associate Jacob Bronowski
assert in Granta that that the poems state the truth with a clarity which is transparent and literal,
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
217
Health
Muriel Spark
Dexedrine was popular at the time as a dieting aid. Spark found letters becoming jumbled on the page as she was reading; she was on the hunt for theological interpretations in the writings of T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
visited VW
for the first time, thereby beginning a lasting association.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan.
47
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
1: 218-19
Friends, Associates
Susan Miles
During her years at Bloomsbury, UR met the many distinguished literary figures who were either parishioners or readers at fund-raising events, like T. S. Eliot
, John Middleton Murry
, Edith Sitwell
, Wilfrid Meynell
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
T. S. Eliot
visited VW
and read The Waste Land to her from manuscript. She recorded in her diary her early impressions of the poem, which the Hogarth Press
published for the first time in...
Friends, Associates
Hope Mirrlees
T. S. Eliot
became a paying guest of HM
, her mother
, and her aunt
at their home in Surrey. He stayed here intermittently for several years, though he was usually in London...
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...
