Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
T. S. Eliot
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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.
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
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...
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
This notice struck Eliotas one of the two or three most intelligent reviews
he had had, and as quite extraordinary from someone who had seen the play but not yet had a chance...
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
Marianne Moore
Eliot
assessed her in his introduction as the greatest living master of light rhyme, and as one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Her brother wrote of The...
Literary responses
Anne Ridler
When Anne Bradby (later AR
) plucked up courage to show some early poems to T. S. Eliot
(though not requesting publication by Faber and Faber
), she was encouraged by his advice: I should...
Literary responses
Q. D. Leavis
Fiction and the Reading Public was widely reviewed. In the Criterion of July 1932, T. S. Eliot
commended its argument: A society which does not recognize the existence of art is barbaric. But a society...
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
The London theatre critics were scathing, with only two exceptions (though one of these, Harold Hobson
, carried a lot of weight). Pamela Hansford Johnson
trounced the play on the BBC
's radio programme The...
