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“... Spectator in August 1929 on, portentously, ‘Problems of the Poet and the Public’. Then T.S. Eliot printed four of the 21-year-old Spender’s poems in the Criterion, bestowing the imprimatur that really counted at the time. Predictably, hosannas of praise greeted his slim volume Poems 1933, published, of course, by Faber – ‘an unmistakable ...”

“... in print may be partly compensation for his real-life reserve and self-absorption, rather as T.S. Eliot wryly described his own pontifical prose style as ‘the braggadocio of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter’. It is doubtful that Orwell lapsed into political defeatism; he wrote a couple of first-rate novels as well as a series ...”

“... He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the Little Review of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it ...”

“... thy neighbour’ as he schemes to enter the bed of the lady next door. They ‘gravelled’ T. S. Eliot when he was composing ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’, yet Eliot was to impose his own philosophy on Dante, affirming the essentiality of Hell’s existence, and that true sinners go there accepting and ...”

“... Its old times are brilliantly rendered, and its appeal is in part generic. The biographer of T.S. Eliot, who was himself to speak of the ‘dark’ experience, of the ‘rude unknown psychic material’, incorporated in his poem The Waste Land, can be seen to contribute to the tradition of romantic fabulation which began with the Gothic novel – a tradition ...”

“... originality, Seven Types was a resounding success, and he was much taken up. Richards urged T.S. Eliot to read the book, and Eliot became a friend. In Britain it was already essential reading for undergraduates in the 1930s. John Crowe Ransom helped its reputation in the States by calling it ‘the most imaginative account ...”

“... One and the same civilisation produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by ...”

“... quality: ‘were they made in commendation of the Devil, ’twere all one to me: ’tis the hypsos that I look after.’ Aubrey’s brief lives of the leaders of the Puritan revolution retain something of his youthful excitement at the sublimity, the magnanimity in defence of liberty, aspired to by the Devil’s party. What was at stake was a ...”

“... the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin Books’ reissue of Boris Ford’s Pelican Guide to English ...”

“... recently, it often seemed like an extended response to a work to which it nowhere adverts – Eliot’s Four Quartets. This curious palimpsest was perhaps motivated by Kermode’s attempt to distance himself from Eliot while accepting the terms within which Eliot had formulated the ...”

“... number of readers but, when it came to matters of prosody, not enough disciples. In 1917 T.S. Eliot, reflecting on the new vers libre, hoped there might be no conflict between the two traditions. ‘In an ideal state of society one might imagine the good New growing naturally from the good Old, without the need for polemic and theory.’ This did not ...”

“... The task of keeping us interested in the canonical poets seems now to have fallen mainly to the Longman Annotated English Poets series. But who are we? Every time another volume is added somebody has to decide who we are, how many we are, and how much annotation and prefatory material we’ll want in addition to a reliable text ...”

“... development. Ballad of the Mari Lwyd, Watkins’s first volume, was not published until 1941. T.S. Eliot evidently preferred Watkins’s more controlled brand of New Romanticism to that of Dylan Thomas, who was published by Dent. Even so, given Thomas’s popularity, Eliot must have been mindful of the similarities between ...”

“... New Freewoman (later known as the Egoist), the Little Review and the Dial. His protégés, T.S. Eliot and James Laughlin, would bear the impress of his tastes when they edited the Criterion and the New Directions publishing house, respectively. But first Pound had to make a splash, along the lines of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition or ...”

“... seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence,’ T.S. Eliot wrote at the beginning of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. How would such an essay go on if it were to begin ‘In Irish writing ...’ and if it were to consider the plight of the novelist? We begin with language. How different words sound on our ...”