The modernism movement has many credos: Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” and Virginia Woolf’s assertion that sometime around December 1910 “human character changed” are but two of the most famous. It is important to remember that modernism is… Read More ›
“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of… Read More ›
Accentual meter: A base meter in which the occurrence of a syllable marked by a stress determines the basic unit, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables. It is one of four base meters used in English (accentual, accentual-syllabic, syllabic,… Read More ›
Nothing happens in Endgame and that nothing is what matters. The author’s feeling about nothing also matters, not because it is true or right but because it is a strongly formed attitude, a felt and expressed viewpoint. . . …. Read More ›
It is the peculiar richness of a play like Waiting for Godot that it opens vistas on so many different perspectives. It is open to philosophical, religious, and psychological interpretations, yet above all it is a poem on time, evanescence,… Read More ›
Imagism is a term associated with an eclectic group of English and American poets working between 1912 and 1917, among them some of the most important writers in English of the first half of the 20th century: Ezra Pound, Amy… Read More ›
The Beat poets were a group of friends living in New York City in the decade following World War II who, through their collaborations, experiments with poetry rhythms, and questioning of the status quo, forever altered the relationship of poetry… Read More ›
Critics feel fairly certain that one group of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets was published in 1633, a collection that included “Batter My Heart,” sometimes listed as “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God.” It gained fame as a prime example of… Read More ›
When Mabel Loomis Todd published this poem in the 1890 Poems under the rubric of nature poems, she set a precedent that would be followed by editors for more than half a century. Todd may have seen it as a… Read More ›
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 ›
First presented on April 19, 1955, as a lecture at a literary luncheon organized by the London Conservative Union, The Literature of Politics was later collected in Eliot’s last collection of prose, To Criticize the Critic, which was published posthumously… 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 ›
First presented as the Gideon Seymour Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1956 and subsequently collected in On Poetry and Poets, this essay takes up where The Function of Criticism had left off some 33 years earlier. While it… 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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