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.
Other speakers in this series included T. S. Eliot
and Lady Rhondda
.
Literary responses
May Sinclair
Reviews were almost all positive.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
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
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
Ezra Pound
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
, a family friend, wrote a warm review for the American Journal Examiner, translating the title as With Tapers Quenched, and concluding: Success to you, young singer in Venice!The...
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
Dorothy Richardson
H. G. Wells
, reviewing this work, wrote that DR
had probably carried impressionism in fiction to its furthest limit. He considered that her percepts never become concepts, and that her heroine is not a...
Literary responses
Cecily Mackworth
T. S. Eliot
, an early and appreciative reader of this book, invited the author to meet him over tea at his Faber and Faber
office in Russell Square. Mackworth, however, felt intimidated by...
Literary responses
Ezra Pound
Monroe
later added, I can't pretend to be much pleased at the course his verse is taking. A hint from Browning
at his most recondite, and erudition in seventeen languages.
qtd. in
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
5
The same year 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, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
2: 385
As Julia Briggs
observes, its readership remained strictly limited; [but] those, like T. S. Eliot
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, 19 May 2005, pp. 3-5.
3
Literary responses
Jo Shapcott
John Kinsella
's initial review called JS
as a great satirist and a virtuoso in meaning and verse movement, one who is doing no less than rewriting the English poetic canon—challenging sources, verse structure and...
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
Though he had accepted it for publication, Eliot
had initially expressed little enthusiasm for this essay.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press, 1977–1984, 5 vols.
3: 49
Hilary Mantel
, reading this essay while very ill herself, indignantly rejected what she saw as Woolf's...
Literary responses
Harriet Shaw Weaver
In 1932Eliot
dedicated his Selected Essays to HSW
: in gratitude and in recognition of her services to English letters.
qtd. in
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking, 1970.
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...
Literary responses
Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan
, however, applies a withering pen to WC
in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
