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.
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
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
followed her Behn biography two years later with Andrew Marvell, to open Faber and Faber
's series The Poets on the Poets (in which the second volume was provided by Eliot
writing on Dante
).
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
222
Textual Production
Doris Lessing
DL
published, in London and New York, her first novel, The Grass is Singing.
The idyllic sound of the novel's title is belied by its context in T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land...
Textual Production
Bryher
Desmond MacCarthy
had launched Life and Letters in June 1928; it issued its last number this month, and Bryher's new publication first appeared in September. It merged it with the London Mercury after May 1939...
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, 1973.
265
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jennings
EJ
titled another poetry volume, Consequently I Rejoice, with words from T. S. Eliot
's Ash Wednesday, quoting the context of the phrase as an epigraph.
British Book News. British Council.
(1977): May insert
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Djuna Barnes
Nightwood was published in New York in March 1937 by Harcourt Brace
, with an introduction by Eliot
praising its great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization...
Textual Production
Ada Leverson
AL
wrote to T. S. Eliot
(editor of The Criterion) offering him an essay on Wilde
, something on Proust
, and a short story, The Consultation.
Wyndham, Violet. The Sphinx and Her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson 1862-1933. A. Deutsch, 1963.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Textual Production
Dylan Thomas
The publication was part of the prize offered by the Sunday Referee for the author of the best poem it had published that year. The previous year's winner had been Pamela Hansford Johnson
, currently...
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...
Textual Production
Denise Levertov
From the age of about seven DL
had a sense of vocation, thinking of herself as an artist-person and as having a destiny. She aspired after fame from the time that she first read...
Textual Production
Mary Butts
Her efforts to find a publisher for this novel did not meet with success until September 1927.
Wormald, Mark. “Not to be forgotten”. Times Literary Supplement, 2 May 2003, pp. 10-12.
10
In a journal entry that year she lamented how the novel might well have been called The...
Textual Production
Edna St Vincent Millay
The Cult of the Occult was a group of poems which ESVM
wrote as a satire on T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
493-4
Textual Production
Rose Macaulay
The title opens an epigraph of three lines of poetry attributed to Anon but actually written by RM
herself. T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land supplied another epigraph.
