In 1956, Eliot published On Poetry and Poets, his first major compilation of previously published essays since Selected Essays in 1932. Among the essays collected in the later volume is “What Is Minor Poetry?,” which Eliot had first delivered as… Read More ›
Another essay from that period in Eliot’s career as a social and literary critic when he was staking out the parameters of his conservative views, Religion and Literature was originally from a lecture organized by the Reverend V. A. Demant… Read More ›
Composed during the same period of early creative energy, innovation, and experimentation of 1910–11 that produced The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “Preludes,” with which it was later collected in his first major… Read More ›
In his preface, Eliot succinctly summarizes his aim and his hopes for this work, itself the published result of three lectures that he had delivered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in March 1939 at the invitation of the Boutwood Foundation…. Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Perhaps related to her mental condition is Virginia Woolf’s (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) interest in perception and perspective, as well as their relationship to imagination, in many stories. In two short avant-garde pieces—“Monday or Tuesday” (six paragraphs)… Read More ›
Katherine Mansfield’s (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) themes are not hard to discover. In 1918, she set herself the tasks of communicating the exhilarating delicacy and peacefulness of the world’s beauty and also of crying out against “corruption.”… Read More ›
D. H. Lawrence’s (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) early stories are set, except for “The Prussian Officer,” in the English Midlands; their plot and characters are a thinly veiled autobiography and are built on incidents that Lawrence would… Read More ›
In August, 1904, James Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) wrote to his friend C. P. Curran: “I am writing a series of epicleti. . . . I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that… Read More ›
The theatrical quality of du Maurier’s (13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989) novels is evidenced by the frequency and reported ease with which her works were adapted for the big screen. Alfred Hitchcock directed film versions of Jamaica Inn,… Read More ›
From the appearance of her first novel in 1915, Virginia Woolf’s work was received with respect—an important point, since she was extremely sensitive to criticism. Descendant of a distinguished literary family, member of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group, herself an experienced… Read More ›
Human loss, disappearance, allocation of responsibility, anguish, and futility stand out as the main issues that figure in Kōbō Abe’s (March 7, 1924 – January 22, 1993) writings. At first, Abe treated such matters mostly in a serious way. Gradually,… Read More ›
E. M. Forster’s (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) most systematic exposition of the novelist’s art, Aspects of the Novel, is no key to his own practice. Written three years after the publication of A Passage to India, the… Read More ›
Most of Charles Bukowski’s writing examines his life as a drunk, drifter, gambler, loner, and unemployed and unemployable creature of habit. As noted in many documentaries, biographies, and accounts of Bukowski’s life, however, he also had a gentle side. As… Read More ›
The reader interested in understanding any of the works of Nikos Kazantzakis would do well to begin by reading Salvatores Dei: Asketike (1927; The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, 1960). In this short philosophical expostulation, Kazantzakis expresses succinctly his strange… Read More ›
In The Courage to Be (1952), Paul Tillich asserts that “the decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the twentieth century is the loss of God in the nineteenth century.” Most critics of… Read More ›