This essay was presented in 1944 as the Presidential Address to the Virgil Society, then published by Faber & Faber in 1945, and finally collected in On Poetry and Poets in 1956. Eliot begins his remarks by moving straight to… Read More ›
Month: July 2020
Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
On September 17, 1932, Eliot set sail from England, where he had been in residence virtually nonstop since the late summer of 1915, to assume for the coming academic year the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at his alma mater, Harvard… Read More ›
Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture
Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot himself gives an uncustomarily detailed account of the publication of Notes towards the Definition of Culture in his brief preface to the booklength edition first published in November 1948. Four years earlier,… Read More ›
Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Metaphysical Poets
There are a handful of indisputable influences on Eliot’s early and most formative period as a poet, influences that are corroborated by the poet’s own testimony in contemporaneous letters and subsequent essays on literature and literary works. Foremost among those… Read More ›
Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
No poet in memory has ever had quite so spectacular a debut as the young T. S. Eliot when his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was first published in Poetry magazine in 1915, thanks in large part… Read More ›
Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi
This poem (1927), the first of Eliot’s contributions to the Ariel series, is, along with “A Song for Simeon,” certainly far easier to place within the immediate context of the Christmas season that inspires it than his later contributions might… Read More ›
Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Hamlet and His Problems
Eliot first published the essay Hamlet and His Problems in Athenaeum on September 26, 1919, and subsequently the piece was collected in The Sacred Wood in 1920. SYNOPSIS In the essay, Eliot was ostensibly reviewing two recent books on William… Read More ›
Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Function of Criticism
Originally published in Eliot’s own literary review, the Criterion, and later collected in Selected Essays in 1932, “The Function of Criticism,” along with “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956) and “To Criticize the Critic” (1961), provides a cogent commentary on what… Read More ›
Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
At the end of October 1943, in the midst of the terrible violence, destruction, and slaughter of World War II, Faber & Faber, Eliot’s publisher since the mid-1920s, released Four Quartets. A relatively slim volume of poetry, it nevertheless brought… Read More ›
Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday
There is perhaps no poem of T. S. Eliot’s that is as deceptively complex as “Ash-Wednesday.” Like many of Eliot’s other works from the period following the publication of The Waste Land in late 1922 and the renown that it… Read More ›
Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Nothing could have prepared either the literary world in general or the curious reader who had been following Eliot’s career to date for the publication, in late 1922, of The Waste Land. Published in October of that year in Eliot’s… Read More ›
A Brief History of Italian Novels
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) argued that Italians are less suited temperamentally to writing novels than to writing poetry, essays, and biographies. Certainly, the art of storytelling has long been esteemed in Italy; Baldassare Castiglione, in Il cortegiano (1528; The Book of… Read More ›
A Brief History of English Novels
To a greater extent than any other literary form, the novel is consistently and directly engaged with the society in which the writer lives and feels compelled to explain, extol, or criticize. The English novel, from its disparate origins to… Read More ›
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