Bradley J. Birzer
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813166186
- eISBN:
- 9780813166643
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813166186.003.0006
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
Continuing the themes of chapter 5, this chapter looks at the relationship between Kirk and T. S. Eliot, noting the profound influence they had on each other. It also carefully considers the ...
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Continuing the themes of chapter 5, this chapter looks at the relationship between Kirk and T. S. Eliot, noting the profound influence they had on each other. It also carefully considers the influence of T. E. Hulme on modern art and poetry.Less
Continuing the themes of chapter 5, this chapter looks at the relationship between Kirk and T. S. Eliot, noting the profound influence they had on each other. It also carefully considers the influence of T. E. Hulme on modern art and poetry.
Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems ...
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This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language, and manipulating the sense-making gestures of French in creative play. This breakthrough initiative is developed in the pseudo-logical prosody of the major quatrain poems of 1917-1919, “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”, and “A Cooking Egg”, while the monologue of “Gerontion” exercises the new poetics in a vivid evocation of its founding historical context. The draft manuscripts and revisions of The Waste Land are discussed in relation to the same poetic principles.Less
This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language, and manipulating the sense-making gestures of French in creative play. This breakthrough initiative is developed in the pseudo-logical prosody of the major quatrain poems of 1917-1919, “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”, and “A Cooking Egg”, while the monologue of “Gerontion” exercises the new poetics in a vivid evocation of its founding historical context. The draft manuscripts and revisions of The Waste Land are discussed in relation to the same poetic principles.
Matthew Hart
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390339
- eISBN:
- 9780199776191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390339.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The ...
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This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The Arrivants (1967–73) alongside his essays from the same period, the chapter explains how Eliot's ideas about poetic language and literary tradition provided an agonistic model for Brathwaite's creation of an archipelagic “nation language.” In doing so, it makes three key interventions in this developing field. First, the chapter rejects traditional narratives of postcolonial belatedness in favor of a dynamic model of literary influence that emphasizes the Caribbean poet's ability to resynthesize his problematic Euro‐American inheritance. Second, it admits the insular nature of Eliot's late poetic, but refuses to make Eliot a straw man for modernist Eurocentrism. Finally, it rejects the picture of Brathwaite as a racial essentialist, reading his “nation language” poetics as a product of the uniquely reflexive sovereignties of the postcolonial Caribbean.Less
This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The Arrivants (1967–73) alongside his essays from the same period, the chapter explains how Eliot's ideas about poetic language and literary tradition provided an agonistic model for Brathwaite's creation of an archipelagic “nation language.” In doing so, it makes three key interventions in this developing field. First, the chapter rejects traditional narratives of postcolonial belatedness in favor of a dynamic model of literary influence that emphasizes the Caribbean poet's ability to resynthesize his problematic Euro‐American inheritance. Second, it admits the insular nature of Eliot's late poetic, but refuses to make Eliot a straw man for modernist Eurocentrism. Finally, it rejects the picture of Brathwaite as a racial essentialist, reading his “nation language” poetics as a product of the uniquely reflexive sovereignties of the postcolonial Caribbean.
John Leonard
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199666553
- eISBN:
- 9780191748967
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199666553.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter examines the twentieth-century attempt to ‘dislodge’ Milton. Leavis deplored Milton’s verse for its alleged ‘monotony’ and ‘ritual’, while Eliot complained that the poem had to be read ...
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This chapter examines the twentieth-century attempt to ‘dislodge’ Milton. Leavis deplored Milton’s verse for its alleged ‘monotony’ and ‘ritual’, while Eliot complained that the poem had to be read twice: once for the sound and again for the sense. This chapter makes the case that the Milton attacked by Leavis and Eliot (and defended by C. S. Lewis) is the Milton constructed by Matthew Arnold in the previous century. Lewis reaffirmed Arnold’s notion of ‘the grand style’ until Ricks recovered the eighteenth-century view that Milton achieves close co-operation between sound and sense. This chapter engages with the question of whether it is possible to match sound with sense, and asks whether Ricks’s defence is still valid now that postmodern theorists have discounted its premises as a ‘fallacy’. Attention is paid to misquotation, including a baleful misquotation by Eliot that was picked up by Leavis and has since been picked up by theorists disdainful of both Leavis and Ricks.Less
This chapter examines the twentieth-century attempt to ‘dislodge’ Milton. Leavis deplored Milton’s verse for its alleged ‘monotony’ and ‘ritual’, while Eliot complained that the poem had to be read twice: once for the sound and again for the sense. This chapter makes the case that the Milton attacked by Leavis and Eliot (and defended by C. S. Lewis) is the Milton constructed by Matthew Arnold in the previous century. Lewis reaffirmed Arnold’s notion of ‘the grand style’ until Ricks recovered the eighteenth-century view that Milton achieves close co-operation between sound and sense. This chapter engages with the question of whether it is possible to match sound with sense, and asks whether Ricks’s defence is still valid now that postmodern theorists have discounted its premises as a ‘fallacy’. Attention is paid to misquotation, including a baleful misquotation by Eliot that was picked up by Leavis and has since been picked up by theorists disdainful of both Leavis and Ricks.
ROBERT CRAWFORD
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199269327
- eISBN:
- 9780191699382
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199269327.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter examines the works of several poets who formed part of the artistic movement called modernism which started in 1919. These poets include T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Unlike other poets, ...
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This chapter examines the works of several poets who formed part of the artistic movement called modernism which started in 1919. These poets include T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Unlike other poets, Eliot and Pound completed their university education and they wrote their poems brimming with academic training. Thus, their poetry registered longing, a jagged sense of pain, accompanied by a heavy load of postgraduate learning. This chapter also suggests that their works are examples of thoroughgoing poetry of knowledge.Less
This chapter examines the works of several poets who formed part of the artistic movement called modernism which started in 1919. These poets include T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Unlike other poets, Eliot and Pound completed their university education and they wrote their poems brimming with academic training. Thus, their poetry registered longing, a jagged sense of pain, accompanied by a heavy load of postgraduate learning. This chapter also suggests that their works are examples of thoroughgoing poetry of knowledge.
Joseph V. Femia
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198280637
- eISBN:
- 9780191599231
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198280637.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
According to the jeopardy thesis, democracy will endanger or even destroy values that we hold dear: cultural excellence, freedom, and economic prosperity. The proponents of the jeopardy thesis are ...
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According to the jeopardy thesis, democracy will endanger or even destroy values that we hold dear: cultural excellence, freedom, and economic prosperity. The proponents of the jeopardy thesis are many and various, ranging from proto‐fascists (Nietzsche, Maurras) and conservatives (T.S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset) through to progressive liberals (J.S. Mill) and laissez‐faire liberals (Hayek). It is concluded that they were unduly alarmist and underestimated democracy's ability to adapt to other values.Less
According to the jeopardy thesis, democracy will endanger or even destroy values that we hold dear: cultural excellence, freedom, and economic prosperity. The proponents of the jeopardy thesis are many and various, ranging from proto‐fascists (Nietzsche, Maurras) and conservatives (T.S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset) through to progressive liberals (J.S. Mill) and laissez‐faire liberals (Hayek). It is concluded that they were unduly alarmist and underestimated democracy's ability to adapt to other values.
Robert Crawford
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264775
- eISBN:
- 9780191734984
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264775.003.0015
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter presents the text of a lecture on T.S. Eliot's poetry given at the British Academy's 2009 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. This text discusses issues concerning biography and Eliot's ...
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This chapter presents the text of a lecture on T.S. Eliot's poetry given at the British Academy's 2009 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. This text discusses issues concerning biography and Eliot's posthumous reputation. It analyses Eliot's poem Marina and argues that it is one of the greatest parent-child poems in the English language. It explains the this work was written in Eliot's career when he was coming to terms with the loss of his parents, with his own childlessness, and with what it might mean to be a godparent.Less
This chapter presents the text of a lecture on T.S. Eliot's poetry given at the British Academy's 2009 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. This text discusses issues concerning biography and Eliot's posthumous reputation. It analyses Eliot's poem Marina and argues that it is one of the greatest parent-child poems in the English language. It explains the this work was written in Eliot's career when he was coming to terms with the loss of his parents, with his own childlessness, and with what it might mean to be a godparent.
Omri Moses
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804789141
- eISBN:
- 9780804791236
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804789141.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter concentrates on elements of character that T. S. Eliot constructs in his early March Hare volume around tonal variations in voice rather than buried structures of personality. It argues ...
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This chapter concentrates on elements of character that T. S. Eliot constructs in his early March Hare volume around tonal variations in voice rather than buried structures of personality. It argues that Eliot rejects psychological models that present character as autonomous, predictable, unsocialized properties (what he calls “personality”). Instead Eliot sets up people's identity by allowing them to select, appropriate, and rechannel other people's voices. This process of creating a persona dispenses with an ideal of authenticity. He thinks people borrow voices and project them in new contexts, which allows them to establish their character by establishing their relations to an audience within a dramatic or circumstantial context. The chapter explores the unpredictability of voice and tone as expressive features of the self, and it uses his dissertation on F. H. Bradley and his meditations on Bergson to theorize how these expressive features work psychologically and poetically.Less
This chapter concentrates on elements of character that T. S. Eliot constructs in his early March Hare volume around tonal variations in voice rather than buried structures of personality. It argues that Eliot rejects psychological models that present character as autonomous, predictable, unsocialized properties (what he calls “personality”). Instead Eliot sets up people's identity by allowing them to select, appropriate, and rechannel other people's voices. This process of creating a persona dispenses with an ideal of authenticity. He thinks people borrow voices and project them in new contexts, which allows them to establish their character by establishing their relations to an audience within a dramatic or circumstantial context. The chapter explores the unpredictability of voice and tone as expressive features of the self, and it uses his dissertation on F. H. Bradley and his meditations on Bergson to theorize how these expressive features work psychologically and poetically.
Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical ...
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What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Public Reason—marks the sizeable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. Identifying it as such, the book outlines the occasion for momentous innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. If modernist writing attempts characteristically to “talk back” to the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this book has recovered the cultural setting of its most substantial—and daring—opportunity. The literature that witnesses this exceptional moment in historical time regains its proper importance as the book retrieves the means of reading it accurately. In this book, the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture combine with abundant visual illustration to provide the framework for groundbreaking engagements with the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. The book relocates the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war and, by restoring the historical content and depth of this literature, reveals its most daunting import.Less
What basis did the Great War of 1914-1918 provide for the verbal inventiveness of “modernist” poetry and fiction? This book reopens this long unanswered question with a work of original historical scholarship. It directs attention to the public culture of the English war. It reads the discourses through which the Liberal party constructed its Cause, its Great Campaign. A breakdown in the established language of liberal modernity—the idiom of Public Reason—marks the sizeable crisis this event represents in the mainstream traditions of post-Reformation Europe. Identifying it as such, the book outlines the occasion for momentous innovations in the work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. If modernist writing attempts characteristically to “talk back” to the standard values of Enlightenment rationalism, this book has recovered the cultural setting of its most substantial—and daring—opportunity. The literature that witnesses this exceptional moment in historical time regains its proper importance as the book retrieves the means of reading it accurately. In this book, the records of political journalism and popular intellectual culture combine with abundant visual illustration to provide the framework for groundbreaking engagements with the major texts of Woolf, Eliot, and Pound. The book relocates the verbal imagination of modernism in the context of the English war and, by restoring the historical content and depth of this literature, reveals its most daunting import.
PETER McDONALD
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Poetry presents a paradox: it is capable of saving us, but it does not matter. However, to read poets like T. S. Eliot and Wystan Hugh Auden for the poetry, and not for something else, makes ...
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Poetry presents a paradox: it is capable of saving us, but it does not matter. However, to read poets like T. S. Eliot and Wystan Hugh Auden for the poetry, and not for something else, makes paradoxes like these redundant, and puts poetic language back into the world where sense has to be made, truths (like lies) can be told, and clarity of meaning is possible. Auden has come to be celebrated as an embodied paradox: he was the greatest poet, and the most sceptical about poetry; he was the most celebrated English poet, and the most misunderstood. From the mid-century onwards, British literary criticism and poetry were much taken up with Eliot. This chapter examines Eliot's engagement with I. A. Richards, his poem Four Quartets, and Tom Paulin's misreading of Eliot.Less
Poetry presents a paradox: it is capable of saving us, but it does not matter. However, to read poets like T. S. Eliot and Wystan Hugh Auden for the poetry, and not for something else, makes paradoxes like these redundant, and puts poetic language back into the world where sense has to be made, truths (like lies) can be told, and clarity of meaning is possible. Auden has come to be celebrated as an embodied paradox: he was the greatest poet, and the most sceptical about poetry; he was the most celebrated English poet, and the most misunderstood. From the mid-century onwards, British literary criticism and poetry were much taken up with Eliot. This chapter examines Eliot's engagement with I. A. Richards, his poem Four Quartets, and Tom Paulin's misreading of Eliot.
Jeremy Diaper
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781942954682
- eISBN:
- 9781789623635
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781942954682.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter establishes that T. S. Eliot had a prolonged interest in issues of food, health and nutrition. Through a close consideration of Eliot’s multifarious references to food in his poetry, ...
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This chapter establishes that T. S. Eliot had a prolonged interest in issues of food, health and nutrition. Through a close consideration of Eliot’s multifarious references to food in his poetry, plays and social criticism, it highlights that Eliot was in close sympathy with the predominant ideas of the British organic movement in the 1930s-50s, from the nutritional benefits of fresh organic produce to the importance of proper culinary skills. By analyzing Eliot’s oeuvre in relation to the extensive allusions to food and fare it also illustrates that Eliot’s attitudes ranged from a playful engagement with cooking in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, to the more putrid and pernicious connotations seen in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and Sweeney Agonistes. Ultimately, whilst this chapter acknowledges that Eliot’s devotion to the spiritual sustenance of the Eucharist transcended the tellurian concerns of food, it emphasizes that he still perceived an important connection between nutrition and spiritual well-being.Less
This chapter establishes that T. S. Eliot had a prolonged interest in issues of food, health and nutrition. Through a close consideration of Eliot’s multifarious references to food in his poetry, plays and social criticism, it highlights that Eliot was in close sympathy with the predominant ideas of the British organic movement in the 1930s-50s, from the nutritional benefits of fresh organic produce to the importance of proper culinary skills. By analyzing Eliot’s oeuvre in relation to the extensive allusions to food and fare it also illustrates that Eliot’s attitudes ranged from a playful engagement with cooking in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, to the more putrid and pernicious connotations seen in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and Sweeney Agonistes. Ultimately, whilst this chapter acknowledges that Eliot’s devotion to the spiritual sustenance of the Eucharist transcended the tellurian concerns of food, it emphasizes that he still perceived an important connection between nutrition and spiritual well-being.
MATTHEW GRIMLEY
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199260201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260201.003.0013
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Economic History
In August 1939, the Anglican missionary and author J. H. Oldham wrote a letter proposing the creation of ‘an order of Christian laymen’. Recipients of his letter included T. S. Eliot, the critic John ...
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In August 1939, the Anglican missionary and author J. H. Oldham wrote a letter proposing the creation of ‘an order of Christian laymen’. Recipients of his letter included T. S. Eliot, the critic John Middleton Murry, and Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim. They were all members of the Moot, a discussion group convened by Oldham, a prominent missionary and pioneer of ecumenism. Oldham's suggestion of the creation of a sort of Christian élite started a debate among Moot members. This chapter argues that the Moot is an interesting case study for students of civil society in Britain because it shows the resurgence in 20th-century political thought of a medieval concept of civil society.Less
In August 1939, the Anglican missionary and author J. H. Oldham wrote a letter proposing the creation of ‘an order of Christian laymen’. Recipients of his letter included T. S. Eliot, the critic John Middleton Murry, and Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim. They were all members of the Moot, a discussion group convened by Oldham, a prominent missionary and pioneer of ecumenism. Oldham's suggestion of the creation of a sort of Christian élite started a debate among Moot members. This chapter argues that the Moot is an interesting case study for students of civil society in Britain because it shows the resurgence in 20th-century political thought of a medieval concept of civil society.
Peter McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a ...
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Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.Less
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.
David‐Antoine Williams
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199583546
- eISBN:
- 9780191595295
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583546.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter offers an extended introduction to the philosophical debate over the ethical value of literature from Plato's expulsion of the poets from his ideal republic to the self‐styled ‘turn to ...
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This chapter offers an extended introduction to the philosophical debate over the ethical value of literature from Plato's expulsion of the poets from his ideal republic to the self‐styled ‘turn to ethics’ in recent literary theory. The sometimes allied tradition of poetic defence or apologia is traced in its development from the neo‐Classical arguments of Renaissance writers through its romanticist, Victorian, and modernist incarnations, to T. S. Eliot's writings, which became the lasting and most influential example for the next generation of poets. This chapter reassesses Eliot's career‐long defence of poetry, paying special attention to the way his late writings integrate the early ideals of ‘poetic integrity’ and ‘auditory imagination’ into a ‘duty to language’, which carries with it a concomitant duty to people.Less
This chapter offers an extended introduction to the philosophical debate over the ethical value of literature from Plato's expulsion of the poets from his ideal republic to the self‐styled ‘turn to ethics’ in recent literary theory. The sometimes allied tradition of poetic defence or apologia is traced in its development from the neo‐Classical arguments of Renaissance writers through its romanticist, Victorian, and modernist incarnations, to T. S. Eliot's writings, which became the lasting and most influential example for the next generation of poets. This chapter reassesses Eliot's career‐long defence of poetry, paying special attention to the way his late writings integrate the early ideals of ‘poetic integrity’ and ‘auditory imagination’ into a ‘duty to language’, which carries with it a concomitant duty to people.
Gayle Rogers
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199914975
- eISBN:
- 9780199980192
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199914975.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Chapter One details the collaborations between these two reviews that eventually led to their joining a pan-European writing contest in 1929 within a network of modernist periodicals. The story of ...
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Chapter One details the collaborations between these two reviews that eventually led to their joining a pan-European writing contest in 1929 within a network of modernist periodicals. The story of how Eliot’s and Ortega’s reviews came to align with one another originates in both editors’ desire to unite an elite international vanguard of disinterested writers and thinkers. I analyze the ways in which the Criterion and the Revista de Occidente promoted often unpopular Europeanizing cultural politics in England and in Spain, and did so in part by crafting their critical voices around one another and around the writers and histories of the other’s nation. Largely outside of the expertise of either editor, these Anglo-Spanish journalistic relations were created by the translators and correspondents they employed, especially Antonio Marichalar and E. R. Curtius. The cosmopolitan attachments to Spanish literature and culture in the Criterion and to British modernism in the Revista de Occidente proved key to both reviews as they authorized their own marginal continental visions and combated fatalistic arguments about Europe and the West. In fact, against the history of Spain’s characterization by northern Europe—Kant in particular—the new cultural expressions of Spain’s “Moorish” blood were actually invoked in defense of these redefinitions of Europe.Less
Chapter One details the collaborations between these two reviews that eventually led to their joining a pan-European writing contest in 1929 within a network of modernist periodicals. The story of how Eliot’s and Ortega’s reviews came to align with one another originates in both editors’ desire to unite an elite international vanguard of disinterested writers and thinkers. I analyze the ways in which the Criterion and the Revista de Occidente promoted often unpopular Europeanizing cultural politics in England and in Spain, and did so in part by crafting their critical voices around one another and around the writers and histories of the other’s nation. Largely outside of the expertise of either editor, these Anglo-Spanish journalistic relations were created by the translators and correspondents they employed, especially Antonio Marichalar and E. R. Curtius. The cosmopolitan attachments to Spanish literature and culture in the Criterion and to British modernism in the Revista de Occidente proved key to both reviews as they authorized their own marginal continental visions and combated fatalistic arguments about Europe and the West. In fact, against the history of Spain’s characterization by northern Europe—Kant in particular—the new cultural expressions of Spain’s “Moorish” blood were actually invoked in defense of these redefinitions of Europe.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter asks whether the kind of reading offered in the previous chapter disarms the possibility of modernist satire, deflecting our attention from criticism to autobiography. It discusses two ...
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This chapter asks whether the kind of reading offered in the previous chapter disarms the possibility of modernist satire, deflecting our attention from criticism to autobiography. It discusses two less equivocally satirical modernists by way of counter‐arguments to this objection. Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man contains some of the most forceful modernist attacks on the auto/biographic; yet Lewis offers the book as itself a kind of intellectual self‐portrait. Conversely, Richard Aldington's Soft Answers is read as a portrait‐collection, adopting modernist parodies of auto/biography in order to satirize modernists such as Eliot and Pound. It argues that (as in the case of Pound, and according to the argument introduced in the Preface) not only can satire be auto/biography, but auto/biography can also be satire. Indeed, Pound was shown in Chapter 9 to be writing both in verse; and in the Chapter 11 Woolf is shown to do both in prose. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the First World War transformed the crisis in life ‐ writing.Less
This chapter asks whether the kind of reading offered in the previous chapter disarms the possibility of modernist satire, deflecting our attention from criticism to autobiography. It discusses two less equivocally satirical modernists by way of counter‐arguments to this objection. Wyndham Lewis's Time and Western Man contains some of the most forceful modernist attacks on the auto/biographic; yet Lewis offers the book as itself a kind of intellectual self‐portrait. Conversely, Richard Aldington's Soft Answers is read as a portrait‐collection, adopting modernist parodies of auto/biography in order to satirize modernists such as Eliot and Pound. It argues that (as in the case of Pound, and according to the argument introduced in the Preface) not only can satire be auto/biography, but auto/biography can also be satire. Indeed, Pound was shown in Chapter 9 to be writing both in verse; and in the Chapter 11 Woolf is shown to do both in prose. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the First World War transformed the crisis in life ‐ writing.
Kate McLoughlin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748647316
- eISBN:
- 9780748684380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647316.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. ...
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In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910-11) is, in Habermasian terms, a less than ideal public sphere; Prufrock and his interlocutors lack the necessary ‘communicative competence’ with which to reach common understanding. Disclosing the affinities between Habermas’s ideas and the philosophies of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley (studied by Eliot at Harvard), the chapter explores why Eliot chose to locate communicative failure in an occasion so apparently benign as a tea-party. The party becomes ‘an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into […] unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication’.Less
In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910-11) is, in Habermasian terms, a less than ideal public sphere; Prufrock and his interlocutors lack the necessary ‘communicative competence’ with which to reach common understanding. Disclosing the affinities between Habermas’s ideas and the philosophies of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley (studied by Eliot at Harvard), the chapter explores why Eliot chose to locate communicative failure in an occasion so apparently benign as a tea-party. The party becomes ‘an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into […] unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication’.
Dayton Haskin
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199212422
- eISBN:
- 9780191707216
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212422.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged ‘metaphysical’ poets. Years later, when an ...
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In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged ‘metaphysical’ poets. Years later, when an appreciation of these poets was considered a consummate mark of a modernist sensibility, T. S. Eliot was routinely credited with having ‘discovered’ Donne himself. This book tracks the myriad ways in which Donne was lodged in literary culture during the Romantic and Victorian periods. The early chapters document a first revival of interest when Walton's Life was said to be ‘in the hands of every reader’; they explore what Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the conditions for the 1839 publication of The Works, which reprinted the sermons of ‘Dr Donne’. Later chapters trace a second revival, when admirers of the biography, turning to the prose letters and the poems to supplement Walton, discovered that his hero's writings entail the sorts of controversial issues that are raised by Browning, by the ‘fleshly school’ of poets, and by self-consciously ‘decadent’ writers of the fin de siéecle. The final chapters treat the spread of the academic study of Donne from Harvard, where already in the 1880s he was the anchor of the 17th-century course, to other institutions and beyond the academy, showing that Donne's status as a writer eclipsed his importance as the subject of Walton's narrative, which Leslie Stephen facetiously called ‘the masterpiece of English biography’.Less
In 1906, having been assigned Izaak Walton's Life of Donne to read for his English class, a Harvard freshman heard a lecture on the long disparaged ‘metaphysical’ poets. Years later, when an appreciation of these poets was considered a consummate mark of a modernist sensibility, T. S. Eliot was routinely credited with having ‘discovered’ Donne himself. This book tracks the myriad ways in which Donne was lodged in literary culture during the Romantic and Victorian periods. The early chapters document a first revival of interest when Walton's Life was said to be ‘in the hands of every reader’; they explore what Wordsworth and Coleridge contributed to the conditions for the 1839 publication of The Works, which reprinted the sermons of ‘Dr Donne’. Later chapters trace a second revival, when admirers of the biography, turning to the prose letters and the poems to supplement Walton, discovered that his hero's writings entail the sorts of controversial issues that are raised by Browning, by the ‘fleshly school’ of poets, and by self-consciously ‘decadent’ writers of the fin de siéecle. The final chapters treat the spread of the academic study of Donne from Harvard, where already in the 1880s he was the anchor of the 17th-century course, to other institutions and beyond the academy, showing that Donne's status as a writer eclipsed his importance as the subject of Walton's narrative, which Leslie Stephen facetiously called ‘the masterpiece of English biography’.
Ankhi Mukherjee
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804785211
- eISBN:
- 9780804788380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804785211.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted ...
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T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted by the criticism it receives down the ages. The chapter examines this co-dependence: the classic is that which survives critical questioning, and it in fact defines itself by that surviving. The chapter also examines the role of international literary criticism in mapping the time and space of a globalised English Studies.Less
T. S. Eliot’s and J.M. Coetzee’s lectures titled “What is a Classic?” seem to suggest that if the classical criterion is of vital importance to literary criticism, the classic in turn is constituted by the criticism it receives down the ages. The chapter examines this co-dependence: the classic is that which survives critical questioning, and it in fact defines itself by that surviving. The chapter also examines the role of international literary criticism in mapping the time and space of a globalised English Studies.
Dayton Haskin
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199212422
- eISBN:
- 9780191707216
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212422.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The tercentenary anniversary of John Donne's death was celebrated during the year before T. S. Eliot inaugurated the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Eliot's essay, ‘Donne in Our ...
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The tercentenary anniversary of John Donne's death was celebrated during the year before T. S. Eliot inaugurated the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Eliot's essay, ‘Donne in Our Time,’ proposed that the vogue for Donne was probably over and that readers would be moving on, as he had, to reading other poets. In fact, through the rest of his life Eliot continued to distance himself from Donne. In the essay ‘To Criticize the Critic,’ he repeated his dissatisfaction with having been ‘credited with starting the vogue for Donne and other metaphysical poets’; and he insisted that he ‘did not discover’ them. Whatever Eliot's personal and professional reasons for attempting to break the connection that others routinely made between him and Donne, the telling point in the tribute that he paid to Dean Briggs is that Donne's place in English literature was already taken for granted in the English curriculum when Eliot matriculated in 1906.Less
The tercentenary anniversary of John Donne's death was celebrated during the year before T. S. Eliot inaugurated the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Eliot's essay, ‘Donne in Our Time,’ proposed that the vogue for Donne was probably over and that readers would be moving on, as he had, to reading other poets. In fact, through the rest of his life Eliot continued to distance himself from Donne. In the essay ‘To Criticize the Critic,’ he repeated his dissatisfaction with having been ‘credited with starting the vogue for Donne and other metaphysical poets’; and he insisted that he ‘did not discover’ them. Whatever Eliot's personal and professional reasons for attempting to break the connection that others routinely made between him and Donne, the telling point in the tribute that he paid to Dean Briggs is that Donne's place in English literature was already taken for granted in the English curriculum when Eliot matriculated in 1906.
