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.
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 Features
H. D.
This is war poetry which looks at the home front, like T. S. Eliot
's Four Quartets and Ezra Pound
's Pisan Cantos. It has been classified as epic.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “’Remembering Shakespeare Always, But Remembering Him Differently’: H.D.’s By Avon River”. Sagetrieb, Vol.
2
, No. 2, 1 June–30 Nov. 1983, pp. 45-70.
45
London under the bombing...
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.
xix
Textual Production
Seamus Heaney
Sweeney was a legendary king of Ireland who ran mad and was transformed into a bird. He is famous for his poetry and his madness. In literary terms he calls to mind the Irish writer...
Textual Production
Ruth Pitter
In 1936 RP
and Michael Head
had published The Matron Cat's Song, for which she wrote the lyric and he the music. (In 1972 Beryl Price
published musical settings for A Cycle of Cats...
Textual Production
Sylvia Beach
Though the essays were solicited and overseen by Joyce
, SB
did much of the editorial work and designed the cover.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
During the year 1951 MS
wrote another verse drama, this time parodic and satirical, aimed at T. S. Eliot
and Christopher Fry
: she called it The Cocktail's not for Drinking. It reached proof...
