“... and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with cold common sense: ‘Perhaps the most significant thing about the War is its insignificance; and it is this insignificance which makes it so acutely tragic. Perhaps fear of war is now rather an incentive, than a preventive, of ...”

“... The writing and presentation of a verse play is fraught with traditional dangers of the kind T.S. Eliot encountered and Auden described when he wrote that Eliot took ‘the only possible line. Except at a few unusual moments, he kept the style Drab.’ Raine, in his preface to The Electrification, showed that he was ...”

“... his qualities of discernment and generosity (he wanted to make a magazine where he himself, Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis could appear regularly – an annexe to the Vortex – but was determined to accept anything that had quality). Much of the detail lacks interest, however, and it is hard to avoid the ungrateful reflection that, since the fine ...”

“... Chekhov and Ibsen, the only foreigners established in the British dramatic repertoire. The task of the actors is to assist Miller’s interpretation. He is not much pleased by the performances he saw in his youth, nor by reports of older performances: he has always been concerned to reject what he calls ‘traditional’ conceptions of the roles, and ...”

“... aggression. Not all translators, however, have followed Dryden and Joyce in seeing their task as a contribution to the formation of a national ‘conscience’ (Joyce’s special definition of the word is not in the OED). When Ezra Pound set out to purify the English language in his Cathay volume of translations from the Chinese, he created a ...”

“... York, the South or the West. It has often been said that Isabel Archer is an imitation of George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, but it is apparent from all the novels of James which have no resemblance to Middlemarch, and from their Emersonian echoes, that The Portrait of a Lady could have brought the theme of aspiration to the point it does without the help of ...”

“... his reading – Carl Jung, Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions – and went to hear T.S. Eliot read at Boston College, claiming afterwards that ‘the only poem he [Eliot] showed any enthusiasm for was a dog poem called Morgan.’ He tried to retain – or regain – the sanctification poetry offered:John’s a ...”

“... Carlylean novel Alton Locke), though leading English novelists including Dickens and George Eliot acknowledged his influence. The world of Sartor is both ancient and modern. It attracts Biblical idiom and resists the securities of realist prose narrative, the confidence that one can tell it like it is. It is an essentially poetic world of myth and ...”

“... poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the manuscript of The Waste Land; to James Laughlin, founder and editor of New Directions (or Nude Erections as Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson of the Dial; to Margaret Anderson ...”

“... doing her duty by her incomprehensible, improvident brother, but with no great relish for the task: ‘I am not a literary person myself,’ she explained, ‘and I do not feel I understand what he wrote, but I feel that I ought to do something about them. Ern kept himself very much to himself and lived on his own of late years and he never said anything ...”

“... variety that not even my wildest hopes had prefigured.’ He was able to discover T.S. Eliot, who, though a genius and a poet, had arrived at the same position as McLuhan ‘concerning the nature of religion and Christianity, the interpretation of history, and the value of industrialism’. I.A. Richards, on the other hand, was a humanist engaged ...”

“... apart from architecture: ‘Under the bam/Under the boo/Under the bamboo tree’, lines that T.S. Eliot copied with deadpan dryness into ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, could be heard a few years later as the refrain for Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien’s dance number in Meet Me in St Louis, not because Vincente Minnelli stole the idea from ...”

“... to have betrayed him: they did the work of the devil in other ways. The relationship with T.S. Eliot was the strangest of all. He was an early hero, and Leavis was still writing about him in his last years, but he was suspect because of his religious opinions and his deplorable Bloomsbury connections. Moreover he was held to have offered little support to ...”

“... Waugh thought Coward agreeable enough but with ‘no brains’.Sometimes he retaliated. T.S. Eliot wrote pompously in an essay on drama: ‘I do not suppose for a moment that Mr Coward has ever spent one hour in the study of ethics.’ ‘I do not think that would have helped me,’ Coward replied, ‘but I think it would have done Mr ...”

“... Heaney’s splicing of contemporary unhappiness and prehistoric savagery was the example of T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land mingled the desolations of Lower Thames Street and Margate sands with the ancient fertility cults involving human sacrifice that he had read about in James Frazer and Jessie Weston. Heaney’s late modernist credentials are strong and ...”