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.
Every Changing Shape was reprinted in 1996 by Carcanet Press
with a foreword by Michael Schmidt
. It collects essays on Christian writers and mystics that address the way that faith informs the creative imagination...
Textual Features
Anita Desai
Influenced by Eliot
's Four Quartets, Clear Light of Day deals with time as destroyer and preserver, and with what the bondage of time does to people.
qtd. in
Gopal, N. Raj. A Critical Study of the Novels of Anita Desai. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1995.
90
It is structured as a four...
Textual Features
May Sinclair
The piece on Flint links him with T. S. Eliot
by using terms similar to those which Sinclair had used in reviewing The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, praising him as a modern...
Textual Features
Rebecca West
In the letters West describes her own writing in contradistinction to that of high modernists. She told the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Arthur Crook
, in a letter of 24 December 1973:...
Textual Features
Mary Butts
In this essay Butts has some praise for Old Bloomsbury, particularly Lytton Strachey
,
Butts, Mary. “Bloomsbury”. Modernism/Modernity, edited by Camilla Bagg et al., Vol.
5
, No. 2, Apr. 1998, pp. 32-45.
34
but criticises it for relativism, artificiality, and lack of engagement with the real world. She credits Wyndham Lewis
for...
His selection was resolutely unfashionable, favouring Hardy
and Betjeman
at the expense of Eliot
and Pound
. He was, however, remarkably generous in his selection of women poets (often for just one or two poems...
Textual Production
Gertrude Stein
Carl Van Vechten
edited and selected the texts to provide a sample of the various styles and periods of GS
's writings. He puts her in the same category as Joyce
, Eliot
, and...
Textual Production
Ezra Pound
For many readers of poetry, Pound's greatest achievement remains the revisions which he instigated in Eliot
's The Waste Land, which led Eliot himself to dedicate the poem to his friend as il miglior...
Textual Production
Maureen Duffy
MD
's website features a series of poems indignantly addressed to William Langland
, author of Piers Plowman, of behalf of the new, unacknowledged poor. The New Vision of Piers Plowless sets the scene:...
Textual Production
P. D. James
PDJ
returned to detective novels with The Skull beneath the Skin, bringing back her female detective Cordelia Gray after a nine-year absence.
The title comes from the second line of Eliot
's disturbing Whispers...
Textual Production
Anne Ridler
AR
's fourth book of poetry was called The Golden Bird, and Other Poems, and included a sonnet written for T. S. Eliot
on his sixtieth birthday.
Backscheider, Paula R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 27. Gale Research, 1980.
MS
reviewed T. S. Eliot
's The Confidential Clerk (for the Church of England Newspaper) when it was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953. She found parallels in this play with her...
Textual Production
Marianne Moore
MM
published her Selected Poems, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot
, who also suggested the order of the poems printed here.
Abbott, Craig S. Marianne Moore: A Descriptive Bibliography. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.
14-16
Moore, Marianne. “Introduction”. The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman, Faber, 2003, p. xix - xxx.
