Eliot's Poetry Research Articles

Drowning, Shipwreck, Sailing: T. S. Eliot’s Voyage of Transformation

Abstract: Drowning, shipwreck and sailing are recurrent images in Eliot’s poetry. Prufrock’s empty existence reaches a crisis imagined as drowning. “Death by Water” was originally the narrative of a doomed voyage, inspired by Dante’s and Tennyson’s portrayal of Ulysses. The Waste Land contains allusions to the shipwreck in The Tempest and to Ophelia’s drowning, leaving Phlebas’ end open to opposite interpretations. After his conversion, Eliot’s poetry has a clear sense of religious purpose: in “Marina”, Ash Wednesday or “The Dry Salvages”, sailing symbolises mystic purgation; shipwreck and drowning are apocalyptic passageways to eternity. This imaginative evolution exemplifi es Jung’s archetype of transformation. Title in Spanish: Ahogamiento, naufragio y navegación: el viaje de transformación de T.S Eliot.Resumen: El ahogamiento, el naufragio y la navegación son imágenes recurrentes en la poesía de Eliot. La vacuidad de Prufrock le lleva a un ahogamiento simbólico. Originalmente, “Death by Water” narraba una travesía fatídica inspirada en el Ulises de Dante y Tennyson. The Waste Land alude al naufragio de The Tempest o al ahogamiento de Ofelia, confi riendo ambigüedad a la muerte de Phlebas. Tras su conversión, la poesía de Eliot adquiere una orientación religiosa: en “Marina”, Ash Wednesday o “The Dry Salvages” la navegación simboliza la purgación mística; el naufragio y el ahogamiento son ritos de paso apocalípticos. Esta evolución ilustra el arquetipo de transformación jungiano.

‘THESE ROMANTIC IRRITATIONS’: T. S. ELIOT AND LOVE POETRY

The word ‘love’ is conspicuous by its virtual absence from T. S. Eliot's early poetry, the only occurrence in verse published before 1930 being in the ironic title of J. Alfred Prufrock's song. Eliot is also associated with the modern critical reaction against nineteenth-century sentimentality, itself invariably linked to love poetry. Yet this review of Eliot's attitudes towards love poetry reveals that the subgenre and its concerns function as a persistent shadow presence throughout his oeuvre and that the rival claims of sentimental, erotic, and divine love profoundly influenced his own writing as well as his views on other poets. The essay concludes by arguing that Eliot's own late love poem, ‘A Dedication to my Wife’, which critics have tended to marginalize, disparage, or ignore, can best be understood and accommodated within the broad context of this underlying concern.

A Companion to George Eliot

A Companion to George Eliot

Buddhist Conceptual Rhyming and T.S.Eliot's Crisis of Connection in TheWaste Land and ‘Burnt Norton’

In this essay, I elaborate a reading of the Buddhist allusions throughout T.S. Eliot's poetry as being not confessions of Buddhist faith or merely syncretic experiments, but rather ‘conceptual rhymes’ with the crisis of personal connection that preoccupies Eliot across multiple texts. In the Buddhist concepts of pratītya-samutpāda, śūnyatā, saṃsāra, and the pretas, Eliot finds thematic resonances with his own emotional and psychological concerns and so alludes to these concepts in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land and ‘Burnt Norton’ of Four Quartets as part of his characteristic poetic collage. By examining the connection between Eliot's personal poetic practice and the cross-cultural traditions upon which he drew, my argument intervenes in a long-standing debate regarding the meaning of Asian religio-philosophical influences in the poet's key texts. Moreover, by close reading the third movement of ‘Burnt Norton’ for Buddhist allusions, I attempt to refocus scrutiny of Buddhism in Eliot from the oft-discussed ‘Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land to Eliot's later Four Quartets, which remains under-examined for its Buddhist influences by scholars who instead attend to the latter text's more pronounced Vedic references.

Imposing Eliot: On Translating Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk

Summary Amongst the contributions to the special edition of the Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir literatuurwetenskap on the oeuvre of Marlene van Niekerk (Volume 25(3) September, 2009), the task of translating her works into English was discussed. This article adopts a critical focus on four instances of the presence of T.S. Eliot's poetry in the translation of her novel Agaat (2004) for the South African English-speaking reader by Michiel Heyns (2006).

Revisiting Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Respectability

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf first met in February 1917. Woolf found Mansfield's worldliness and conversation about the craft of writing fascinating and compelling. She tended, though, to conflate her anxieties about the worldliness—cheapness, commonness, sharpness—with what she read as the flaws in Mansfield's writing. This essay recontextualizes Woolf's judgements of Mansfield's respectability as a writer taking as its first point of departure Woolf's superficial reading of Mansfield's story “Pictures”, and as its second Woolf's response to reading passages about writing from Mansfield's journals in John Middleton Murry's “Introductory Note” to the posthumous collection The Dove's Nest and Other Stories (1923). The passages address in large part the writing of “At the Bay”. “Pictures” engages with T. S. Eliot's early poetry and cinematic techniques to humanize a topical contemporary social type, the amateur. The analysis of “At the Bay” examines what some of Mansfield's own reservations about the story suggest about her awareness of new aesthetic concepts and the commercialized ways she might be making working- and lower-middle-class characters intelligible to her expanding audience.

Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot: A Tangled Relationship

This essay proposes that although Hemingway would never acknowledge it, T.S. Eliot was an important early "mentor"—one Hemingway could not put aside. Ezra Pound's greatest service to Hemingway may have been directing him to Eliot's poetry just when The Waste Land made Eliot the dominant poet of Literary Modernism. The two writers never met, but Hemingway nevertheless continued to read, to ponder, and to remember Eliot's poetry and his criticism. Despite his habit of mocking Eliot in print, Hemingway was in fact the poet's irreverent disciple.

"My father shook my soul awake": Salvaging Family Relationships in George Eliot's Poetry

Research Article| September 01 2011 "My father shook my soul awake": Salvaging Family Relationships in George Eliot's Poetry Valerie Sanders Valerie Sanders Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies (2011) 60-61 (1): 77–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/42827889 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Valerie Sanders; "My father shook my soul awake": Salvaging Family Relationships in George Eliot's Poetry. George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies 1 September 2011; 60-61 (1): 77–90. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/42827889 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressGeorge Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 Northern Illionois University2011Northern Illionois University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Preface: The Cultural Place of George Eliot's Poetry

Research Article| September 01 2011 Preface: The Cultural Place of George Eliot's Poetry Isobel Armstrong Isobel Armstrong Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies (2011) 60-61 (1): 3–6. https://doi.org/10.2307/42827883 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Isobel Armstrong; Preface: The Cultural Place of George Eliot's Poetry. George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies 1 September 2011; 60-61 (1): 3–6. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/42827883 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressGeorge Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 Northern Illionois University2011Northern Illionois University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction: George Eliot and the Poetics of Disbelief

This introduction is for the special issue edited by Hadjiafxendi entitled 'The cultural place of George Eliot's poetry'. This issue tries to reclaim Eliot's place in the literary canon as a poet by exploring the challenges that her poetry posed and still poses to its readers today. All its contributors experiment with different ways of reading Eliot's poems in their own right rather than as narratives that happen to be in poetic form. In so doing, the aim is to sketch out 'an Eliot who is barely visible in her novels'.

Preface: The Cultural Place of George Eliot's Poetry

Preface: The Cultural Place of George Eliot's Poetry

"My father shook my soul awake": Salvaging Family Relationships in George Eliot's Poetry

"My father shook my soul awake": Salvaging Family Relationships in George Eliot's Poetry

FORD MADOX FORD'S ESSAY ON POETRY AND T.S.ELIOT'S THE WAST LAND

The aim of this article is to bring together Ford Madox Ford's essay "Impressionism — Some Speculations", published as a preface to his own Collected Poems (1911) and considered to be "one of the most important critical documents to have been written on modern verse", and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), one of the most celebrated poems of the twentieth century. By comparing both texts, one becomes aware that Ford's esthetic principles become concretized in Eliot's poetry and in this way Ford, although considered a minor poet, has succeeded in his criticism to prognosticate some of the directions Eliot (and consequently a whole generation of poets influenced by him)would follow.

T. S. Eliot: a short biography

Biographical writing about Eliot is in a more confused and contested state than is the case with any other major twentieth-century writer. No major biography has been released since the publication of his early poems, Inventions of the March Hare, in 1996, which radically altered the reading public's perception of Eliot. There have been attempts to turn the American woman Emily Hale into the beloved woman of Eliot's middle years; and Eliot has also been blamed for the instability of his first wife and declared a closet homosexual. This biography frees Eliot from such distortions, as well as from his cold and unemotional image. It offers a sympathetic study of his first marriage which does not attempt to blame, but to understand; it shows how Eliot's poetry can be read for its revelations about his inner world. Eliot once wrote that every poem was an epitaph, meaning that it was the inscription on the tombstone of the experience which it commemorated. His poetry shows, however, that the deepest experiences of his life would not lie down and die, and that he felt condemned to write about them. John Worthen is the acclaimed author of D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider.

T. S. Eliot by Craig Raine (review)

YES, 39.1 & 2, 2009 205 T. S. Eliot. By Craig Raine. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. xxi + 202 pp. ?12.99. isbn: 978-o-53?993-5 Craig Raine's short, insightful, generously spaced book on Eliot appears inanAmerican series entitled 'Lives and Legacies', but it isno critical biography.Aspects of Eliot's life are presented ina fewpages of 'Preface' thatprecede thebook's Introduction, and ina final 'Appendix 3'. The main textofferskeen insightsintoEliot's poetry,with an eleven page chapter on the drama, twenty-one pages on the criticism, and a thirty-page appendix on 'Eliot and Anti-Semitism'. If itsproportions are provocatively odd, then, given that thisbook isfrom theUS imprintofOUP, and sopresumably aimed not least atAmerican students, the tone can be inappropriate: 'We are all of us familiarwith the poem whose real subject is less important than itsrhyme scheme. F.T. Prince's "Soldiers Bathing", for instance.Reading such a poem is likewatching show jumping at Hick stead' (p. 32). There are toomany nods and winks towriters, writings, and assumed cultural co-ordinates tomake thisa book suitable for introducingEliot to, say,first-year students.This is a great pity (and could have been sorted by tough-minded editing), because Raine's study comes closer than most others to communicating on paper the strengthsof a traditional, rather combative Oxford tutorial. The lastwords of Raine's main textare both rhapsodic and donnish: 'Breath taking.Discuss' (p. 147).Repeatedly he offers good one-liners ('TheWaste Land is Eliot's greatest dramatic work', p. 90), telling points about selected details (as when he quotes the sentence of Lucian's ^euxis, which follows thewords Eliot chose as his epigraph to 'Mr.Apollinax'), and finely phrased evaluation: 'overall, Eliot's tart,pitiless, unforgiving irony has none of Laforgue's wry, sprighdy self inculpation' (p. 42). His book is full of intelligence and communicates a strong sense of writerly personality: 'Wewriters frequently inherit our themes from our most admired predecessors' (p. xiv). This poet-critic has a passion for Eliot's poetry, seeing it inmany ways as exemplary. Yet when Raine tells readers Ash-Wednesday 'isEliot's indestructible Das Lied vonderErie' (p. 33), he appears unconcerned that tomany modern readers this statement will mean litde.Raine's book seems the product not least of excited, potentially exciting pedagogy; but there are also pedagogical issues it shirks.The danger is that, however brilliant, this litde volume will be seen as preaching to the converted. I enjoyed it,but I have taught a course on T. S. Eliot for twenty years. Raine's index has no entries for Cats or even Old Possum's Book ofPractical Cats\ nor for Marie Lloyd, Dracula, or music hall. So Eliot too often emerges as a highbrow poet admired by people with donnish tastes and a gift forwaspish put-downs, rather than as a poet of intense emotion, able to fuse nursery rhymes with high culture to incendiary and moving effect ? yet also to create Macavity. Raine relishes Eliot's work, but his taste for intellectual jousting and a desire to exhibit his dauntingly well-stocked mind too often get in theway. This brilliandy opinionated study is at times too show-offy towin many new readers forEliot. Deeply honourable both in theway itdefends its subject, and sometimes in the way itjustly reserves judgement, theAppendix that deals with anti-Semitism is 206Reviews awkwardly appended, while Raine airbrushes out Eliot's rhymes about King Bolo and his big black queen. What Eliot needs now is a sympathetic critical biography that is addressed to the unconverted. Pithy, provocative, donnishly brilliant, Raine's is toomuch an insider's book. University of St Andrews Robert Crawford Metafictionand Metahistory inContemporary Women'sWriting.Edited byAnn Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 48.00. xi + 222 pp. isbn: 978-0-230-00504-4. Since the late 1980s,historyhas emerged as an increasinglyprominent theme incontem porarywriting, and historical literature ? a genre once dismissed as escapist pap ? has discovered a new critical and cultural respectability: what was 'then' is very 'now'. Heilmann and Llewellyn's timely collection of essays considers what is specific about how contemporary women writers represent history.Their clear and purposeful intro duction, oudining the aims and...

The Landscapes in W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot's Poetry

The Landscapes in W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot's Poetry

The Medieval Poetics of Pilgrimage and Multiple Voices

Scholars have long sought to identify sources of T. S. Eliot's poetic development, a search that seems invited by th poet's essays on such as Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Pope. However, occasionally obscure those ties which are less explicitly referenced. Eliot's poetry modifies our understanding of Chaucer's verse, and thus works of these poets can be understood as exerting a reciprocal influence on one another. Moreover, it cannot be overlooked that Eliot had particular advantage of studying Chaucer's poetry prior to embarking on his own poetic career, and this advantage is clearly intimated in Eliot's early verse. Eliot never discussed his debts to Chaucer, nor is included among dozens of writers cited in Eliot's Notes to The Waste Land. However, in his 1926 review of Root's Troilus and Criseyde, Eliot argued that the whole stock of commonplaces about must be reinventoried reinventory of critical commonplaces about Chaucer in his 1909 course at Harvard. It has been intent of this study to measure Eliot's own poetry against that of Chaucer's, without privileging work of either. Such a comparison yields insight into both poets' works.

T. S. Eliot and Racine: Tragedy and Resignation in Berenice

In addition to the influence of Dante, T. S. Eliot's poetry was deeply indebted to that of Racine. This becomes clear when all his references to the French dramatist are collated. They show that Eliot regarded Racine as one of the major voices of European literature. In particular, his praise of Berenice in The use of poetry and the use of criticism indicates the nature of this debt. Eliot focuses on the element of resignation in the play. It is suggested that Eliot's view of tragedy was deeply affected by his own predilection for resignation. This helps to explain his affinity to Racine, though it does not fully account for the power of Racine's poetry itself. The article concludes with a discussion of the ending of Berenice.

You! hypocrite lecteur! New Readings of T. S. Eliot

Review Article| September 01 2007 You! hypocrite lecteur! New Readings of T. S. Eliot Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot, edited by Laity, Cassandra; Gish, Nancy K., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 265 pages. Carrie J. Preston Carrie J. Preston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2007) 53 (3): 414–420. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2007-4008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Carrie J. Preston; You! hypocrite lecteur! New Readings of T. S. Eliot. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2007; 53 (3): 414–420. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2007-4008 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Gender, desire, and sexuality in T.S. Eliot

Acknowledgements Notes on contributors Introduction: Eliot, gender and modernity Cassandra Laity Part I. Homoeroticisms: 1. The love song of T. S. Eliot: elegiac homoeroticism in the early poetry Colleen Lamos 2. T. S. Eliot, famous clairvoyante Tim Dean 3. 'Cells in one body': nation and eros in the early work of T. S. Eliot Michele Tepper 4. The masculinity behind the ghosts of modernism in Eliot's Four Quartets Peter Middleton Part II. Desire: 5. Discarnate desire: T. S. Eliot and the poetics of dissociation Nancy K. Gish 6. Mimetic desire and the return to origins in The Waste Land Jewel Spears Brooker 7. Theorizing emotion in Eliot's poetry and poetics Charles Altieri Part III. Modern Women: 8. Through schoolhouse windows: women, the academy and T. S. Eliot Gail McDonald 9. T. S. Eliot speaks the body: the privileging of female discourse in Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party Richard Badenhausen 10. T. S. Eliot, women and democracy Rachel Potter 11. Vipers, viragos and spiritual rebels: women in T. S. Eliot's Christian society plays Elisabeth Daumer Index.