197425 pages
Critical essay, Biog...
Introduction I PERCEIVED that I myself had always been a New Englander in the South West [meaning St. Louis, Missouri], and a South Westerner in New England.” This comment of T. S. Eliot’s, referring to his childhood...
20033 pages
Biography
1380LAnglo-American poet and critic; b. St. Louis, Mo., Sept. 26, 1888, d. London, Jan. 4, 1965. He was the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Stearns Eliot, and the grandson of William Greenleaf...
199821 pages
Biography, Critical ...
Introduction IN THE 1920s, T. S. Eliot’s densely allusive style gained him an international reputation on the order of Albert Einstein’s, but his fondness for European models and subjects prompted some of his...
201716 pages
Author bibliography,...
Julia E. Daniel WHILE T. S. ELIOT rightfully enjoys a prominent seat in the pantheon of American literature, he is a strangely difficult poet to place. While he eventually became more English than the English, down to...
Editors:Marie Rose Napierkowski and Mary RubyFrom:Poetry for Students
(Vol. 1. )
199819 pages
Critical essay, Work...
T. S. Eliot 1915 Segments of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” often called “the first Modernist poem,” appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1906 while Eliot was an undergraduate. He later read the poem to Ezra...
200018 pages
Poem explanation, Cr...
T. S. Eliot 1927 T. S. Eliot is best known for his lengthy, complex poems such as “Ash Wednesday” and the Four Quartets. Many readers find these poems daunting, not only because of their length but because of their...
200126 pages
Character overview, ...
T. S. ELIOT 1949 T. S. Eliot was at Princeton in 1948, working on the play One-Eye Riley, which would eventually develop into The Cocktail Party, when he received word that he had garnered that year’s Nobel Prize for...
200316 pages
Table, Excerpt, Crit...
JAY PARINI Introduction AMERICAN POETRY IN the twentieth century has no more obvious and important landmark than The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s famously difficult and original poem in five parts. It remains one of the...
199823 pages
Character overview, ...
T. S. ELIOT 1935 In 1163, a quarrel began between the British King Henry II and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. The men had been good friends, but each felt that his interests should be of primary concern...
200011 pages
Poem explanation, Pl...
Peter Viereck 1948 Although his work is not read much today, Peter Viereck was one of the leading American poets of the 1950s and 1960s. But Viereck did not limit himself to writing poetry; he also became an important...
197424 pages
Critical essay, Biog...
Introduction ONE OF Allen Tate’s essays, “A Southern Mode of the Imagination,” mentions an amiable old calumny against Kentucky: that it seceded from the Union after the fighting was over. Lincoln had promised not to...
199619 pages
Critical essay, Biog...
Introduction DURING THE EIGHTIES and early nineties, because of the attention given to his nonfiction bestseller, Iron John: A Book about Men, published in 1990, and because of his TV interviews, videocassette...
199914 pages
Poem explanation, Cr...
Andrew Marvell 1678 “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell is a classic carpe diem poem in which a sophisticated and mature man, the speaker in the poem, attempts to persuade his young mistress to yield to his amorous...
200113 pages
Poem explanation, Cr...
Howard Nemerov 1950 “The Phoenix” concludes Howard Nemerov’s second collection of poetry, Guide to the Ruins. Its plainspoken and flat tone, its short lines, and its subject matter of death and rebirth perfectly suit...
197425 pages
Critical essay, Biog...
Introduction AS A poet and man of letters, Archibald MacLeish has illuminated the most serious problems which the twentieth-century literary artist must face, and at the same time has shown how they may be solved. This...
200113 pages
Biography
Introduction THE NOVELS AND short stories of Susan Minot address the universal themes of desire, death, the self, and memory. Memory, always partial, fragmentary, and only tenuously based in history, nonetheless serves...
200115 pages
Excerpt, Critical es...
1320LWILBURN WILLIAMS Introduction OF ALL THE black writers of his generation—with the exception of Richard Wright—Melvin Beaunorus Tolson was born into circumstances least likely to nurture a major poet. Langston Hughes,...
Editors:Marie Rose Napierkowski and Mary RubyFrom:Poetry for Students
(Vol. 1. )
199812 pages
Biography, Critical ...
William Carlos Williams 1923 william Carlos William’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” was first published in the collection Spring and All in 1923. The poem is a good example of Williams’s statement, “No ideas, but in...
199129 pages
Critical essay, Biog...
Introduction IN A 1983 interview with John Koethe, John Ashbery offered the following explanation of his poetry by way of advice: “You should try to make your poem as representative as possible.” Ashbery’s own poetry...
198132 pages
Critical essay, Biog...
Introduction YVOR WINTERS is commonly thought of as a stingy critic, and rarely thought of as a poet. He yielded little. He was convinced that T. Sturge Moore and Robert Bridges were greater poets than William Butler...
Introduction I PERCEIVED that I myself had always been a New Englander in the South West [meaning St. Louis, Missouri], and a South Westerner in New England.” This comment of T. S. Eliot’s, referring to his childhood...
T. S. Eliot 1915 Segments of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” often called “the first Modernist poem,” appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1906 while Eliot was an undergraduate. He later read the poem to Ezra...