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“... novel, comes when Jamie reflects from Byron: Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence. ‘He picked up the coffee-pot. By Byron’s standards, he was not a man.’ But is he even an existence? Twenty pages later, and now in that foreign country from which he had emigrated, Canada, his rage splutters into the murder ...”

“... noticed in this country, and (up to now, anyway) literary editors have set their heavies to the task of reviewing it. Why the fuss over what is, after all, no more than a lively compilation of literary biographies, a descriptive rather than analytical account that adds little to published materials already familiar to the reader interested in the ...”

“... Owen, for example, who thought the poetry was in the pity, but went on writing poems; or T.S. Eliot, who admitted he found it hard, in London in 1942, ‘to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is justified activity,’ yet chose in ‘Little Gidding’ to give the anxiety of influence precedence over a more ...”

“... obvious note of celebration, a quality of melancholy, even of tragedy. In a wonderful essay about Eliot – ‘T.S. Eliot at 101’ – she points out that ‘Eliot did once fill a football stadium. On 30 April 1956, fourteen thousand people came to hear him lecture on The Frontiers of ...”

“... In T.S. Eliot we find the poet as farmer’: now that truly is revisionist. If the pin-striped modernist with the ‘features of clerical cut’ ever put his hand to a pitchfork, the incident has gone unreported. And yet in Romantic Moderns, her provocative critical survey of English cultural life between 1930 and 1945, Alexandra Harris points to Eliot’s lines in ‘East Coker’ about ‘Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth/Mirth of those long since under earth/Nourishing the corn ...”

“... that in modern society the arts depend on a current of ideas which it is the universities’ task – at least in theory – to provide and protect. The trouble comes with the theory. Nobody could pretend that universities are at present, or were ever, especially alive with applied intelligence. In addition, we are in a difficult phase of academic ...”

“... for ‘rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or sherry’: but he then affirms that an original poet has the task of ‘creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’. The same applies to the manufacturers of most new products, so that the poet-critic has this in common with the advertising agency. Both are in the business of forming the public’s view of what it ...”

“... watching East Enders or equivalent divertissements of the ‘modern’ world anathematised by T.S. Eliot in his great poem of breakdown, The Waste Land. I am inclined to agree with ‘official’ psychiatry that Freud and Jung have little to offer the acutely ill, fascinating as they are to the moderately well. On the other hand, it is important that your ...”

“... Emily Hale​ was Eliot’s ‘Raspberrymouth’. That’s what he called her in the love letters they began exchanging in 1927, a correspondence that intensified in the early 1930s, and continued through the awkward years of their disentanglement after the death of his first wife, Vivien, in 1947. Eliot’s love for Emily, his ‘Tall Girl’, retained all the shy ardour he felt when he first met her as a young student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1912 ...”

“... beautiful work and, as a commemoration of the Blitz, ought now to take its place beside T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”, and Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and “Ceremony after a Fire Raid”’. But ‘Epithalamion’ outdoes it: there ‘is much more to this work than the other, and nearly all of ...”

“... combines their traditions, right down to following James in this book to where T.S. Eliot was mildly shocked to find him, seeking spiritual life in English country houses. Conrad’s pertinence to Naipaul is written not all over, but all in, the novels of the Seventies, and ‘Conrad’s Darkness’ was enlightened by Naipaul in an essay of ...”

“... concerned. Criticism (pace Hirsch) rates significance above meaning because the critic’s prime task is not to agree but to disagree with the prevailing views. But disagreement – and intellectual life in general – becomes pointless unless there is some common ground of agreement to start from. The critic’s role (and here I agree with Docherty) is an ...”

“... and Morgan’s novel subtly and not ignobly acknowledges this and embodies it. Morgan and T.S. Eliot were fellow Kensingtonians and clearly had a great deal in common. The spirituality of Four Quartets, combining grave withdrawn delicacy with a remarkable power of commanding instant middlebrow popularity, has much in common with that of The Fountain, even ...”

“... yet to sidle up to it from the outside, was the peculiar privilege of Wilde, Yeats, Conrad, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Beckett, nomadic souls adrift between home and abroad. Wilde, Conrad, James and Eliot betray their foreign status by becoming plus anglais que les Anglais, too deeply, self-consciously inside to count as ...”

“... is a difference between what Middlemarch is seeking to do at any particular point, and what George Eliot had in mind at the time, if she had anything particular in mind at all. The literary intentions that matter are those built into a work itself, rather as the structure of a chair ‘intends’ one’s sitting on it. If I say, ‘I promise to loan you five ...”