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.
As a teenager, EJ
read T. S. Eliot
and (as she put it) wrote long poems of sort of vers libre which I imagined were influenced by Eliot, and which were very personal, in fact...
Intertextuality and Influence
Virginia Woolf
Yet, though her voice (and her social and political views) were and would remain quite different from theirs, she was keenly attentive to the works of male contemporaries who were, like her, working to create...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anita Desai
AD
's work weaves together a wide range of cultural and literary references: the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgîtâ, as well as such European authors as E. M. Forster
, T. S. Eliot
, Dickinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Ellen Harrison
JEH
's work exerted a palpable influence on the Modernist movement in literature, and both her persona and her life's work were represented, sometimes in much modified form, in many creative texts. Critic Julia Briggs
Intertextuality and Influence
Kathleen Nott
Here KN
writes a lively style, with ingenious images and examples, paradoxes like giving a name a bad dog (by which she means taking a concept like Liberalism or Science and using it pejoratively),
Nott, Kathleen. The Emperor’s Clothes. Heinemann, 1953.
43
Intertextuality and Influence
Julian of Norwich
T. S. Eliot
used Julian's words and concepts for the final lines of Little Gidding. Iris Murdoch
claimed her as an influence. She is the subject of a video by Films for the Humanities and Sciences
After harking back to the days in which eminent authors were not public figures, she amusingly described the culture of public performance which arose during the 1960s. Highlights in her narrative were the first Writers'...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna O'Brien
EOB
's imaginative development was nourished by her wide reading, and consideration of a number of writers helped to shape her own style and vision. She has said in (April 2002) that one learns the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sylvia Kantaris
Other poems are self-referential examinations of poetry and writing. The Recluse describes the inability of the contemporary poet to present in verse (like the unnamed William Wordsworth
) the rustic tale of a chance-met old...
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Shuttle
The first book that affected PS
deeply was Brontë
's Jane Eyre, with whose protagonist she identified.
At fifteen she read T. S. Eliot
and Emily Dickinson
and conceived a wish to be...
Intertextuality and Influence
Laura Riding
Reviews were good in the main. Not only did LR
's friend and associate Jacob Bronowski
assert in Granta that that the poems state the truth with a clarity which is transparent and literal,
qtd. in
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
217
Intertextuality and Influence
Agatha Christie
The title is taken from an image in Eliot
's Little Gidding (published six years before). Set in Cornwall in 1945, the story presents the political climate of the immediate postwar era through a narrator...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hope Mirrlees
HM
observed that Paris was deeply influenced by Cocteau
's poem Le Cape de Bonne Espérance. It also is replete with literary and other allusions apart from Cocteau.
Henig, Suzanne. “Queen of Lud: Hope Mirrlees”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
1
, No. 1, 1972, pp. 8-27.
13
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Though it is frequently read...
Leisure and Society
Dorothy L. Sayers
Other speakers in this series included T. S. Eliot
and Lady Rhondda
.
