The Letters of T. S. Eliot

The Letters of T. S. Eliot
Author: T. S. Eliot
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 933
Release: 2015-07-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300218052

This fifth volume of the collected letters of poet, playwright, essayist, and literary critic Thomas Stearns Eliot covers the years 1930 through 1931. It was during this period that the acclaimed American-born writer earnestly embraced his newly avowed Anglo-Catholic faith, a decision that earned him the antagonism of friends like Virginia Woolf and Herbert Read. Also evidenced in these correspondences is Eliot’s growing estrangement from his wife Vivien, with the writer’s newfound dedication to the Anglican Church exacerbating the unhappiness of an already tormented union. Yet despite his personal trials, this period was one of great literary activity for Eliot. In 1930 he composed the poems Ash-Wednesday and Marina, and published Coriolan and a translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase the following year. As director at the British publishing house Faber & Faber and editor of The Criterion, he encouraged W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Ralph Hogdson, published James Joyce’s Haveth Childers Everywhere, and turned down a book proposal from Eric Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell. Through Eliot’s correspondences from this time the reader gets a full-bodied view of a great artist at a personal, professional, and spiritual crossroads.

The Letters of T. S. Eliot

The Letters of T. S. Eliot
Author: T. S. Eliot
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 914
Release: 2011-09-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300176864

Volume One: 1898–1922 presents some 1,400 letters encompassing the years of Eliot's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, through 1922, by which time the poet had settled in England, married his first wife, and published The Waste Land. Since the first publication of this volume in 1988, many new materials from British and American sources have come to light. More than two hundred of these newly discovered letters are now included, filling crucial gaps in the record and shedding new light on Eliot's activities in London during and after the First World War. Volume Two: 1923–1925 covers the early years of Eliot's editorship of The Criterion, publication of The Hollow Men, and his developing thought about poetry and poetics. The volume offers 1,400 letters, charting Eliot's journey toward conversion to the Anglican faith, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher and his appointment as director of the new publishing house Faber & Gwyer. The prolific and various correspondence in this volume testifies to Eliot's growing influence as cultural commentator and editor.

The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I

The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I
Author: T. S. Eliot
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 1349
Release: 2018-12-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0374235139

The first volume of the first paperback edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot This two-volume critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s poems establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909–1962, rectifying accidental omissions and errors that have crept in during the century since Eliot’s astonishing debut, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In addition to the masterpieces, The Poems of T. S. Eliot contains the poems of Eliot’s youth, which were rediscovered only decades later; poems that circulated privately during his lifetime; and love poems from his final years, written for his wife, Valerie. Calling upon Eliot’s critical writings as well as his drafts, letters, and other original materials, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the imaginative life of each poem. This first volume respects Eliot’s decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909–1962 as he arranged and issued it shortly before his death. This is followed by poems uncollected but either written for or suitable for publication, and by a new reading text of the drafts of The Waste Land. The second volume opens with the two books of verse of other kinds that Eliot issued: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Anabasis, his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase. Each of these sections is accompanied by its own commentary. Finally, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a comprehensive textual history that contains not only variants from all known drafts and the many printings but also extended passages amounting to hundreds of lines of compelling verse.

T. S. Eliot and the Mother

T. S. Eliot and the Mother
Author: Matthew Geary
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000375897

The first full-length study on T. S. Eliot and the mother, this book responds to a shortfall in understanding the true importance of Eliot’s poet-mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, to his life and works. In doing so, it radically rethinks Eliot’s ambivalence towards women. In a context of mother–son ambivalence (simultaneous feelings of love and hate), it shows how his search for belief and love converged with a developing maternal poetics. Importantly, the chapters combine standard literary critical methods and extensive archival research with innovative feminist, maternal and psychoanalytic theorisations of mother–child relationships, such as those developed by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin, Jan Campbell and Rozsika Parker. These maternal thinkers emphasise the vital importance and benefit of recognising the pre-Oedipal mother and maternal subjectivity, contrary to traditional, repressive Oedipal models of masculinity. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters look at Eliot’s changing representations and articulations of the mother/ mother–child relationship from his very earliest writings through to the later plays. Focus is given to decisive mid-career works: Ash-Wednesday (1930), ‘Marina’ (1930), ‘Coriolan’ (1931–32) and The Family Reunion (1939), as well as to canonical works The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Notably, the study draws heavily on the wide range of Eliot materials now available, including the new editions of the complete poems, the complete prose and the volumes of letters, which are transforming our perception of the poet and challenging critical attitudes. The book also gives unprecedented attention to Charlotte Eliot’s life and writings and brings her individual female experience and subjectivity to the fore. Significantly, it establishes Charlotte’s death in 1929 as a decisive juncture, marking both Eliot’s New Life and the apotheosis of the feminine symbolised in Ash-Wednesday. Central to this proposition is Geary’s new formulation for recognising and examining a maternal poetics, which also compels a new concept of maternal allegory as a modern mode of literary epiphany. T. S. Eliot and the Mother reveals the role of the mother and the dynamics of mother–son ambivalence to be far more complicated, enduring, changeable and essential to Eliot’s personal, religious and poetic development than previously acknowledged.

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual
Author: John D. Morgenstern
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-07-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1949979091

Volume 3 features a special forum on “Eliot and Green Modernism,” edited by Julia E. Daniel, as well as a special forum titled “First Readings of the Eliot–Hale Archive,” edited by John Whittier-Ferguson.

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I
Author: W. H. Auden
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 842
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 069121929X

The first of two volumes of the eagerly anticipated first complete edition of Auden’s poems—including some that have never been published before W. H. Auden (1907–1973) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his reputation has only grown since his death. Published on the hundredth anniversary of the year in which he began to write poetry, this is the first of two volumes of the first complete edition of Auden’s poems. Edited, introduced, and annotated by renowned Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, this definitive edition includes all the poems Auden wrote for publication, in their original texts, and all his later revised versions, as well as poems and songs he never published, some of them printed here for the first time. This volume traces the development of Auden’s early career, and contains all the poems, including juvenilia, that he published or submitted for publication, from his first printed work, in 1927, at age twenty, through the poems he wrote during his first months in America, in 1939, when he was thirty-two. The book also includes poems that Auden wrote during his adult career with the expectation that he might publish them, but which he never did; song lyrics that he wrote to be set to music by Benjamin Britten, but which he never put into print; and verses that he wrote for magazines at schools where he was teaching. The main text presents the poems in their original published versions. The notes include the extensive revisions that he made to his poems over the course of his career, and provide explanations of obscure references. The second volume of this edition, Poems, Volume 2: 1940–1973, is also available.

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual
Author: John D. Morgenstern
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 194295428X

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual strives to be the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot's life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the new edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays. All critical approaches are welcome, as are essays pertaining to any aspect of Eliot's work as a poet, critic, playwright, editor, or foremost exemplar of literary modernism. John D. Morgenstern, General Editor Editorial Advisory Board: Ronald Bush, University of Oxford David Chinitz, University of Loyola, Chicago Anthony Cuda, University of North Carolina-Greensboro Robert Crawford, University of St Andrews Frances Dickey, University of Missouri John Haffenden, University of Sheffield Benjamin G. Lockerd, Grand Valley State University Gail McDonald, Goldsmiths, University of London Gabrielle McIntire, Queen's University Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia Christopher Ricks, Boston University Ronald Schuchard, Emory University Vincent Sherry, Washington University at St. Louis

Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture

Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture
Author: Paul Giles
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2019-02-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192566210

This volume trace ways in which time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist culture, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the decade after World War II. Though modernism is often associated with revolutionary or futurist directions, this book argues instead that a retrograde dimension is embedded within it. By juxtaposing the literature of Europe and North America with that of Australia and New Zealand, it suggests how this antipodean context serves to defamiliarize and reconceptualize normative modernist understandings of temporal progression. Backgazing thus moves beyond the treatment of a specific geographical periphery as another margin on the expanding field of 'New Modernist Studies'. Instead, it offers a systematic investigation of the transformative effect of retrograde dimensions on our understanding of canonical modernist texts. The title, 'backgazing', is taken from Australian poet Robert G. FitzGerald's 1938 poem 'Essay on Memory', and it epitomizes how the cultural history of modernism can be restructured according to a radically different discursive map. Backgazing intellectually reconfigures US and European modernism within a planetary orbit in which the literature of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, far from being merely an annexed margin, can be seen substantively to change the directional compass of modernism more generally. By reading canonical modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot alongside marginalized writers such as Nancy Cunard and others and relatively neglected authors from Australia and New Zealand, this book offers a revisionist cultural history of modernist time, one framed by a recognition of how its measurement is modulated across geographical space.

T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems

T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems
Author: Anna Budziak
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-09-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000432033

T. S. Eliot once stated that the supreme poet "in writing himself, writes his time". In saying that, he honoured Dante and Shakespeare, but this pithy remark fittingly characterises his own work, including The Ariel Poems, with which he promptly and pointedly responded to the problems of his times. Published with unwavering regularity, a poem a year, the Ariels were composed in the period when Eliot was mainly writing prose; and, like his prose, they reverberated with diverse contemporary issues ranging from the revision of the Book of Common Prayer to the translations of Heidegger to the questions of leadership and populism. In order to highlight the poems' historical specificity, this study seeks to outline the constellations of thought connecting Eliot’s poetry and prose. In addition, it attempts to expose the Ariels’ shared arc of meaning, an unobtrusive incarnational metaphor determining the perspective from which they propose an unorthodox understanding of the epoch— an underlying pattern of thought bringing them together into a conceptually discrete set. This is the first study that both universalizes and historicises the series, striving to disclose the regular without suppressing the random. Approaching the series as a system of orderly disorder, the notion very much at home with chaos theory, it suggests new intellectual contexts, offering interpretations that are either fresh, or significantly reangled.

Moonlighting

Moonlighting
Author: Nathan Waddell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192548646

How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poetry and prose resemble Beethoven's compositions. This book takes a different approach. It focuses on how early twentieth-century writers—chief among them E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf—profited from the representational conventions associated in the nineteenth century and beyond with Beethovenian culture. The emphasis of Moonlighting falls for the most part on how modernist writers made use of Beethovenian legend. It is concerned neither with formal similarities between Beethoven's music and modernist writing nor with the music of Beethoven per se, but with certain ways of understanding Beethoven's music which had long before 1900 taken shape as habit, myth, cliché, and fantasy, and with the influence they had on experimental writing up to 1930. Moonlighting suggests that the modernists drew knowingly and creatively on the conventional. It proposes that many of the most experimental works of modernist literature were shaped by a knowing reliance on Beethovenian consensus; in short, that the literary modernists knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it, and that they were eager to use it.