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“... has in mind is a form of what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion. On this view, the task of critique is to dig out hidden meanings and concealed contradictions in a text, scanning it for those symptomatic points at which it falters, deadlocks, disrupts its own logic or threatens to come apart at the seams. The critical act is one of unmasking ...”

“... them to lisp in numbers.Edmund Blunden at one point sent a batch of Douglas’s work to T.S. Eliot at Faber and Eliot’s response was encouraging. Douglas, though, made sure that he was not caught blushing. His reaction was to wonder how much he could get for Eliot’s ...”

“... will fight impertinent biographers through the courts (like J.D. Salinger). They will (like T.S. Eliot or Jack London) set up vigilant estates to stand like pyramids over the author’s reputation and defy any tomb-robbing researcher. They will themselves incinerate mountains of correspondence (as did Dickens) or enjoin survivors to do it for them (like ...”

“... that neither the boasts nor the admissions of defeat are to be read too literally: his poetic task is both ‘impossible and imperative’. Nancy Gish’s book is the most critically acute of a number of recent studies, and she very effectively dispatches the notion that the later poetry reveals an inexorable decline.* She concludes with praise of the ...”

“... role in a hilariously bad production in Great Expectations. When he agonisedly wonders whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings etc he is assailed by contradictory cries from the audience: ‘Some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said “Toss up for it”; and quite a Debating ...”

“... as an escape from all that science would bring to our attention. While contemporaries such as Eliot or Pound yearned to attribute to the modern poet the objectivity of a professional scientist, as illustrated by Eliot’s famous comparison in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ of a poet’s mind in action with ...”

“... By 1907, James was with the Whartons in Paris for a two-month stay, and she wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in praise of her visitor’s character (not his works): ‘The more one knows him the more one wonders – admires the mixture of wisdom – tolerance, of sensitiveness – sympathy, that makes his heart even more interesting to contemplate than his ...”

“... of her book is that, beyond all the sound and fury, Baudelaire was a good Catholic boy. T.S. Eliot gave some plausible reasons for taking Baudelaire’s tortured relation with Catholicism seriously, but, though Richardson cites Eliot, she does not emulate him. Indeed her own counterpart to Starkie is the truly demented ...”

“... like nursery rhymes, on the compelling force of dreams’: why couldn’t he be friends with T.S. Eliot? (Happily, he never knew that Eliot called him Shitwell and said of the whole Sitwell enterprise that it bore ‘a little the air of smattering’.) Soon after New Bearings, Osbert would publish a riposte called ...”

“... arbitrary preferences).     All this is perhaps no more than a rephrasing of what T.S. Eliot meant when he said that Donne picked out ideas because he was ‘interested in the feeling they give’ – only I would argue that what Eliot observes is not an individual aberration on Donne’s part but, however we may ...”

“... sexual experience included – over the age’s preference for absorption in technique. T.S. Eliot came in for a politely lethal rebuke after being pissy about Forster’s description of D.H. Lawrence as ‘the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation’. (‘Mr Eliot … asks me exactly what I mean by ...”

“... have found its quality of not being all there the secret of his highly idiosyncratic genius. T.S. Eliot professed himself mystified by these exemplarily Shelleyan lines from ‘To a Skylark’:Keen as are the arrows      Of that silver sphereWhose intense lamp narrows      In the white dawn clear,Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.‘I ...”

“... hell emptied to provide a cast list. A shelter on Margate Sands is the only place where T.S. Eliot, fidgeting with his notes for The Waste Land, transcribed what was immediately in front of him. He sketched Cockney excursionists on the beach, then returned for dinner to his hotel in Cliftonville (now known, Seabrook says, as Kosoville). Walking with ...”

“... though language really was a practical tool and not something that used its users. Writing to the TLS about Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ and the lines ‘sheer plod makes plough down sillion/Shine’, Empson makes clear that a poem about a mystery does not need to mystify. ‘Surely the newly ploughed furrows are what “shine”,’ he writes, ‘not the ...”

“... of the century remaining, seems more secure than ever. Faulkner was one of those authors (T.S. Eliot being another) who prayed that his immortality as a writer would not entail a Life after death, since he believed all biographers treated the word ‘private’ as if it began with a ‘pry’. His prayer has not been heard by whatever questionable gods ...”