T. S. Eliot

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses A. E. Housman
At AEH 's death Virginia Woolf wrote that although she had personal reservations about his muse—Always too laden with a peculiar scent for my taste. May, death, lads, Shropshire—
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
6: 33
he had...
Literary responses Dorothy L. Sayers
Within Sayers's lifetime she had become a figure of controversy on account of the element of Christian partisanship in her non-fictional works. In The Emperor's Clothes, 1953, Kathleen Nott bracketed Sayers with T. S. Eliot
Literary responses Vernon Lee
Lee's work had a highly mixed reception. It was praised by Pater: in a footnote added to the third edition of his Renaissance, he calls Euphoriona work abounding in knowledge and insights on...
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
VW wrote to Ethel Smyth that the stories were diversions or treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
4: 231
An Unwritten Novel, she said, showed her...
Literary responses Kathleen Raine
KR longed vainly to be published by Eliot at Faber; by the time that she heard from Yeats 's daughter, years later, that he had first read her at the recommendation of Eliot , she...
Literary responses Susan Miles
This book appeared with very distinguished endorsement on its jacket. T. S. Eliot wrote that he found it a very poignant story.Storm Jameson wrote, Its simplicities are at a profound level. The theme is...
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
As a manifesto for modernism, Jacob's Room divided the critics. T. S. Eliot wrote in a letter that VW had now succeeded in freeing her original gift from compromise with the traditional novel.
qtd. in
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
444
Arnold Bennett
Literary responses Anne Ridler
AR later judged that her dialogue was pretty good but her technical capacity unequal to her ambitious theme.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, 2004, p. 240 pp.
146
The play was well received on opening night and throughout its run; Eliot was enthusiastic, and...
Literary responses Ann Quin
Berg earned AQ two major awards: the Harkness Fellowship, given to the most promising Commonwealth artist under thirty years, and the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship from the University of New Mexico .
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
Giles Gordon
Literary responses Edna St Vincent Millay
Edmund Wilson disliked this work, apparently because the communist in it is just as ridiculous as the stockbroker, so that no authoritative, authorized, left-wing voice is supplied.
qtd. in
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
406
But its success was stunning.
qtd. in
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
405
Literary responses Radclyffe Hall
A number of writers rallied in support of RH . E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf drafted a letter protesting the suppression of The Well of Loneliness. Its signatories included Bernard Shaw , T. S. Eliot
Literary responses Dora Russell
This text was somewhat controversial: she noted, for instance, that T. S. Eliot was shocked by her statement that [a]nimals we are and animals we remain, and the path to our regeneration, if there be...
Literary responses Laura Riding
Allen Tate praised the volume in the New Republic, prophesying a brilliant future for Riding. When John Gould Fletcher in The Criterion called her poems derivative, Graves wrote to criticise both Fletcher for being...
Literary responses James Joyce
T. S. Eliot praised the book in the Athenæum for 4 July 1919; Ezra Pound wrote to Joyce that Bloom is a great man; Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that the book reeled...
Literary responses May Sinclair
Reviews were almost all positive.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
255
Writing in the Dial in September 1922, T. S. Eliot used this novel as the most notable example of the psychoanalytical type which, however, he disapproved in principle. Its...

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