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.
Her friendship with Dora Marsden
remained constant until Marsden's mental health deteriorated. Marsden was one of the few people who knew and addressed HSW
by her pseudonym, Josephine Wright. After Weaver closed down the...
MM
corresponded with T. S. Eliot
from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D.
and of Bryher
, and her editors believe that every one of her five...
Friends, Associates
Susan Hill
While studying at King's CollegeSH
, an aspiring writer, wrote to novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson
and her writer husband C. P. Snow
for advice on the profession. The couple answered her letters and even...
Friends, Associates
Nancy Cunard
Her boredom with this life (her mother's social milieu) was something that she shared with her friend Iris Tree
, also a poet. Despite her antipathy towards it, this life presented her with important literary...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Bishop
In her junior year at college EB
interviewed T. S. Eliot
, who was in town to deliver the Norton Lectures. A year later she met Marianne Moore
.
Marshall, Megan. Elizabeth Bishop. A Miracle for Breakfast. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxix
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Nancy Cunard
The same company published Pound
and Eliot
(whose Prufrock is a pervasive presence in Cunard's first two collections). The title of this one strikes a note characteristic of her throughout her life. In later life...
Intertextuality and Influence
Diana Athill
She opens on things she would like to do which age makes inappropriate or impossible: acquiring a puppy, or watch a tree-fern grow to maturity. (A postscript records that the tree-fern, discouragingly tiny when it...
Intertextuality and Influence
Michelene Wandor
It proclaims: this is the story of two people // this is the story of two peoples // and one God / your God or mine?
Wandor, Michelene. The Music of the Prophets. Arc Publications, 2006.
34
In tracing the story to before the Act...
Intertextuality and Influence
Nancy Cunard
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
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, 1989.
309, 311
Intertextuality and Influence
W. H. Auden
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
Rose Tremain
Her dedicatee was a bookstore owner in Nashville, Tennessee, where he involved himself in the Civil Rights movement in 1960. (His son Richard
is known as a writer). RT
uses three epigraphs: from St John of the Cross
