Questions tagged [t-s-eliot]
Questions about the U.S.-born British poet, literary critic, dramatist and publisher T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) and his works. As a poet, Eliot is best known for poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), "The Wasteland" (1922) and the "Four Quartets" (1943). His plays include "Murder in the Cathedral" (1935) and "The Cocktail Party" (1949). As a critic, he is said to have influenced by New Criticism.
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What does this line from an essay on T. S. Eliot mean?
The following extract is from Charles Altieri's essay "Eliot's Impact on twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry" published in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Here, Altieri is ...
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“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.” Is this a genuine TS Eliot quote?
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
This quote has been attributed to TS Eliot, but I can't find any sources for it outside lists of inspirational quotes, ...
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Why did T.S. Eliot compare “waiting for death” with “a feather on the back of the hand"?
A Song for Simeon
Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a ...
user175
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Did T.S. Eliot really plagiarize in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
I've been trying to do research to confirm my English teacher's claim that T. S. Eliot plagiarized works by Jules Laforgue, Henri Bergson, and Andrew Marvell in his poem "The Love Song of J. ...
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How is the poem “Gerontion” affected by being told in the first person?
The poem ‘Gerontion’ by T.S. Eliot is about an old man and his life. The very first lines if the poem are as follows:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
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What did Eliot mean when he said “I would suggest that none of the plays of Shakespeare has a meaning”?
I was reading a grammar book in which the discussion was going on about whether to treat “none” as singular or plural, then the book gave this quote by T.S. Eliot:
I would suggest that none of the ...
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Identify the source of this quote by T.S. Eliot
I came across this quote of T.S. Eliot
There are a large number of people… who believe that all ills are fundamentally economic.
I’m craving to know Eliot’s view on it and for that I need to find ...
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Can the influence of the 1918 "Spanish flu" pandemic be seen in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"?
A Guardian article from summer 2020, "The Covid novels are arriving. And they'll be a warning to future generations" by Laura Spinney, includes some discussion of the (apparently minimal) ...
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Are the names J. Alfred Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley completely arbitrary?
T.S. Eliot's first professionally published poem was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", in which Eliot narrates the experience of a character named J. Alfred Prufrock. Similarly, Ezra ...
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Why does the first chapter of Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark" open with this Eliot verse in Black Matters?
As an epigraph a T. S. Eliot verse appears at the beginning of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination:
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, ...
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Understanding the first dialogue of Archbishop Thomas Becket involving antitheses
In Murder in Cathedral by T.S. Eliot, when Archbishop Thomas Becket returns from France, and sees the second priest scolding the women of Chorus, he says
Peace. And let them be, in their exaltation.
...
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Understanding the meaning of "Eructation of unhealthy souls" in T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton
In the third section of Burnt Norton we find these lines
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Eructation have two meanings
Belching
Eruption
So, if we take up the second ...
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Understanding the second section of first part of Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot
The first section of first part of Burnt Norton seems to be focused on "time", although it is too abstract and as I say "beyond my perceptible sense" but in the least we understand ...
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Why do all the lines of Burnt Norton seem unconnected?
I'm reading Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot. I have read its background (that manor house theme) and a few months ago read Murder in the Cathedral (as Wikipedia says says, "He created it while working ...
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What do the fourth tempter's words mean, from “Murder in the Cathedral”?
In the play Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot, the fourth tempter comes to Thomas Becket and after some conversation between them the fourth tempter says
You know and do not know, what is it to ...
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What does T. S. Eliot mean by "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper"?
I once read a poem "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot. The poet ended the verse like this:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a ...
user5000
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Could T.S. Eliot's namedrop early on in Catch-22 be a play on The Wasteland
Both pieces of work are reactions to post-war trauma, but unlike The Wasteland, which aims to put back together the fragments of Western Literature, fractured by The Great War, and sees the grand ...
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What are T. S. Eliot’s “Jellicle Cats” and “Pollicle Dogs”?
T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Song of the Jellicles’ was first published in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and was popularized by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. It begins:
Jellicle Cats ...
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Was T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" plagiarised?
This Q&A mention accusations of plagiarism levelled at T. S. Eliot in the context of his famous poem "The Waste Land". There seems to be a lot of information about this on the internet, for ...
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Were T. S. Eliot's notes to The Waste Land partly inspired by plagiarism laws?
T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" is usually printed with the poet's notes. However, these notes were not present in the original edition and were added in a later edition dating from the same year (...
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Did T. S. Eliot write crime novels under a pseudonym?
T. S. Eliot has a reputation as a difficult and serious poet. He also wrote very serious essays about other serious authors. However, according to Johannes Kleinstück (T. S. Eliot - mit ...
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What is the difference between emotions and feelings in Eliot's essay Tradition and the Individual Talent?
In his most famous essay, "Traditional and the Individual Talent", T. S. Eliot appears to make a distinction between emotions and feelings. Read especially the following passage (emphasis mine):
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In T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", how do the wind and the "pearls that were his eyes" connect to the central message of the poem?
I'm having trouble interpreting the significance of a specific stanza in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing ...
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Why did T.S. Eliot make a statement that 'Coriolanus' was Shakespeare's masterpiece and that 'Hamlet' was an artistic failure?
According to T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare actually failed as an artist in Hamlet. Those who have read the relevant critical essay by Eliot, could you kindly let me in on the title of that essay and explain ...
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Why does Dennis Brown say Hughes's Crow is "a sly parody of Eliot's later style"?
In Dennis Brown's The Poetry of Postmodernity, in the chapter dedicated to Ted Hughes' Crow, the author comments:
Crow reads like some checklist of postmodernist techniques [...]
[Including] ...
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What is the relationship between Heart of Darkness and The Hollow Men?
T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men, unusually, opens with a quote from a Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:
Mistah Kurtz— he dead.
In most printings of the poem that I've seen, this single quote is ...
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"wind" or "wind"? re: Little Gidding, II.50
yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
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Which Upanishad is TS Eliot referencing with "Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata." and why?
Specifically the last lines of the Wasteland:
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
[The Wasteland]
The poem was written in 1922, and the invocation can be taken as a ...
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Interpreting the line "'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men" in The Waste Land
I'm hoping to get some insight into line 74 of The Waste Land (you can read The Waste Land online). Here's the passage in question (line 74 is in bold):
That corpse you planted last year in your ...
user111
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How did T.S. Eliot's literary criticism affect his poetry?
T.S. Eliot wrote influential essays in New Criticism, a literary theory movement that if I understand correctly tried to revive formalism and focus on close reading and the text itself, as a response ...
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What is the "heap of broken images" in The Waste Land?
In T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read online), T. S. Eliot claims that someone (probably either humankind or the reader) only knows "a heap of broken images".
What are the roots ...
user111
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Significance of the Phoenician Sailor having pearls for eyes in The Waste Land
In T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read online), the "Phoenician Sailor" (an image on a tarrot card) is described as having pearls for eyes in lie 48:
Is your card, the drowned ...
user111
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Understanding the key in The Waste Land
A passage from the fifth part of the poem The Waste Land (which you can read online) says:
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in ...
user111
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Symbolism of "hot gammon" in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
I'm reading T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read for free online) and one particular line stuck out at me:
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they ...
user111