Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
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...
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
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
Anne Ridler
When Anne Bradby (later AR
) plucked up courage to show some early poems to T. S. Eliot
(though not requesting publication by Faber and Faber
), she was encouraged by his advice: I should...
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.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
406
But its success was stunning.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
405
Literary responses
Agatha Christie
Some critics felt that the novel's twist was a rotten, unfair trick. The London News Chronicle reviewer observed that it was a tasteless and unforgiving let-down by a writer we had grown to admire.But...
Literary responses
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
When most women writers of her age were forgotten, the Countess of Pembroke retained a niche in literary history as a partner in the Sidneian psalms as well as the dedicatee of the Arcadia....
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
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
Hope Mirrlees
Paris was received by an appreciative audience. Before its publication Virginia Woolf
described it as very obscure, indecent, and brilliant.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
2: 385
As Julia Briggs
observes, its readership remained strictly limited; [but] those, like T. S. Eliot
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
This notice struck Eliotas one of the two or three most intelligent reviews
he had had, and as quite extraordinary from someone who had seen the play but not yet had a chance...
Literary responses
William Empson
The book was a resounding success, widely recommended by T. S. Eliot
in Britain and by John Crowe Ransom
in the USA.
Kermode, Frank. “The Savage Life”. London Review of Books, pp. 3-5.
3
Literary responses
H. D.
T. S. Eliot
wrote that HD's versions of these choruses were allowing for errors and even occasional omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English than those of the then renowned scholar...
Literary responses
Jean Rhys
Critically, Rhys has been lauded as a modernist writer, a feminist writer, and, more recently, a postcolonial, Caribbean, or Creole writer. Biographer Carole Angier suggests that her preoccupation with exile was common in her time...
