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 ›
American Literature
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 ›
A Brief History of American Novels
America became a subject for literature after the Revolutionary War, when writers began the exploration of themes and motifs distinctly American. Continuing the Puritan belief in America as the New Eden, writers stressed the millennial nature of settlement and progress…. Read More ›
Analysis of Anne Tyler’s Novels
In The Writer on Her Work, Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) discusses the importance of her having lived as a child in “an experimental Quaker community in the wilderness.” For her, this early experience of isolation and her later… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of Rudolfo A. Anaya
Rudolfo A. Anaya’s (1937-2020) works project a Magical Realism that blends contemporary life with the hidden manifestations of humanity and cultural identity. In his books, the principal characters struggle with the sometimes contradictory notions of Chicano identity tied both to… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of James Agee
James Agee’s earliest published book, Permit Me Voyage (1934), was a collection of poems, his second a nonfiction account of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression. He and photographer Walker Evans lived with their subjects for eight weeks in 1936… Read More ›
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