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.
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.
Assistant editors were Richard Aldington
and Leonard Compton-Rickett
, and later H. D.
(when Aldington went to war in June 1916) and T. S. Eliot
(from July 1917). Contributors of creative work and critical reviews...
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
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...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
VW
continued to write personal essays on a range of subjects, some weighty, some witty, but her literary and critical essays are the centre of her work in this genre. In these she wrote about...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Virginia Woolf
Character in Fiction, the further essay which emerged from Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, is reflective, philosophical, fictional, its tone assertive, witty, ironical, and serious. It ranges
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Editors McNeillie, Andrew and Stuart Nelson Clarke, Hogarth Press, 1986–2011, 6 vols.
3: 421
living writers into two...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Nancy Cunard
Making their first appearance in print are poems written for Valentine Ackland
and for Nina Hamnett
, and NC
's elegy for Eliot
, written a few weeks after his death and only two months...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jeanette Winterson
In these essays JW
defends the power and importance of art, and the necessity of difficult art, discusses the works of Virginia Woolf
, T. S. Eliot
, and Gertrude Stein
, and explores her...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Laura Riding
Although this volume appeared later, its second chapter was the root of the concluding chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Gertrude Stein
is a test case here: T. S. Eliot
is hauled over...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Stevenson
Here ASargues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment it opens the future to further change. Quoting from her own The...
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
114
LR
sets out to free the poet from the restrictions imposed by the synthetic or collective notion...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marghanita Laski
ML
defines ecstasy as experiences that are joyful, transitory, unexpected, rare, valued, and extraordinary to the point of often seeming as if derived from a praeternatural source.
Laski, Marghanita. Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences. Cresset Press, 1961.
5
An ecstatic state is one in which...
Wealth and Poverty
Sylvia Beach
Eleanor Beach
fully supported her daughter's dream of owning a bookstore. She worked with her broker to get SB
the necessary $3,000 (24,810 francs) in August 1919 in order to start the business.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton, 1983.
