“... 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 ...”

“... Richards once noted. In a notorious passage in Practical Criticism, Richards suggested that a good test of a poem’s sincerity would be to meditate for a while on the following topics: 1. Man’s loneliness (the isolation of the human situation). 2. The facts of birth, and of death, in their inexplicable oddity. 3. The inconceivable immensity of the ...”

“... prose has its own duties to perform and will not pay close attention to the heroine. The prose’s task is stupefaction; this stupor may mirror the emotional state of the protagonist, but that is only a coincidence. The prose mimics catatonia because fugue states are the foundation of any prose that wishes to be contemporary. Maurice Blanchot’s novels might ...”

“... the world about her difficulties. These friends have explained that when Muriel Spark thought T.S. Eliot was breaking into her flat to take bits of food from her cupboard, she thought this because she was ill, not because she was demonically possessed. They have claimed some credit for her conversion, and have praised her for the ‘attractions of her ...”

“... trees up there, or bonny fruits or flying fish or rains that will cleanse and replenish. T.S. Eliot remarked once that Puritan mythology was ‘thin’ and Milton’s heaven and hell were like ‘insufficiently furnished apartments filled with heavy conversation’. Did he really know of a mythological heaven in which the conversation was fascinating? In ...”

“... a potato field, desperately clutching a university library copy of The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot, ‘in the Faber & Faber edition’), ‘a raid on the ...”

“... perhaps the odd Martian) can gain admission. I’ll shelve it at some distance from T.S. Eliot. Indeed, my copy will end up nearer to Jürgen Habermas, who first diagnosed this modern crisis of tradition – that it should be made more and more vitally necessary by the very same developments that erode it – in the early Seventies. In Oliver’s ...”

“... the customary respect that would upper-case your father. If it matters whether a poem by T.S. Eliot says ‘Jew’ or ‘jew’ although the poem cannot say them differently, it could matter exactly how a son is presented as addressing his father even if, or especially if, the distinction would be smoulderingly meant to elude a father’s ears. In Mr ...”

“... he was writing it. Unfortunately, the new Cambridge edition is almost useless as an aid for this task. This edition gives the text of the first American edition, published in November 1920, now corrected from manuscript; to this it adds variants from the British editions of June 1921 onwards. These variants first arose because Martin Secker wanted the novel ...”

“... whose toughness they mirror. With dozens of books on subjects as various as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, geodesic domes and computer poetry to his credit, Hugh Kenner, one of the moving forces behind the California series, is the éminence grise of American Modernism. It is not hard to imagine why he likes cartoons in general and Chuck Jones in ...”

“... freedom from ‘fixed points’, gave to many members of the intelligentsia, among them T.S. Eliot, was repeated seven years later with the advent of daytime broadcasting on the Third’s wavelength. The Music Programme was steadily expanded, until in 1965 it occupied the whole of each weekday before Network Three’s successor, Study Session, came ...”

“... are missing from the index. How Fitzgerald came to know Stevie Smith and when it was that T.S. Eliot told her that the staircase from the Poetry Bookshop featured in ‘Ash Wednesday’ are among the questions that hang in the air. Neither Fitzgerald’s date of birth nor that of her children is given, and whether the religious faith that meant so much to ...”

“... Bellow signals a protagonist’s status by listing his contacts (‘Conrad Aiken praised him, T.S. Eliot took favourable notice of his poems, and even Yvor Winters had a good word to say for him’ – Humboldt’s Gift); Roth often writes as a fictionalised version of himself, an internationally recognised writer approached by characters who want him to write ...”

“... Indian and Sri Lankan contributors are pictured with their white, establishment collaborators T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and William Empson. It’s no wonder that Portland Place seemed the world’s omphalos. Sandhu also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great ...”