T. S. Eliot and Organicism


Book Description

This book reads T. S. Eliot’s poetry and plays in light of his sustained preoccupation with organicism. It demonstrates that Eliot’s environmental concerns emerged as a notable theme in his literary works from his early poetry notebook of poems known as Inventions of the March Hare at least until Murder in the Cathedral.




T. S. Eliot and Organicism


Book Description

T. S. Eliot and Organicism provides the firstcomprehensive account of Eliot's preoccupation with agrarianism, organicism andthe environment. Jeremy Diaper elucidates and contextualizes several facets ofEliot's organic thinking, ranging from composting and soil fertility, toregionalism, nutrition and culinary skills. Through detailed examination ofEliot's engagement with organic issues, this book offers environmental readingsof Eliot's poetry and plays and demonstrates that agrarian concerns emerge as anotable theme in his literary output - from his earliest notebook of poemsknown as Inventions of the March Hareto Murder in the Cathedral. This bookalso analyzes Eliot's prose to illuminatehis engagement with the key environmental debates which were taking placeduring the 1930s-50s. Diaper offers a thorough analysis of Eliot's socialcriticism and explores his perturbation regarding the decline of agriculture inAfter Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.T.S. Eliot and Organicismbreaks new ground by demonstrating that a thorough understanding of Eliot'sengagement with environmentalism is vital to our interpretation of both hispoetry and prose. It establishes that one of the twentieth century's mosteminent literary figures should be remembered for his important role in theemergence of the organic husbandry movement and for his wide-ranging commentson a variety of environmental and organic issues.




The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual


Book Description

Volume 3 features a special forum on “Eliot and Green Modernism,” edited by Julia E. Daniel, as well as a special forum titled “First Readings of the Eliot–Hale Archive,” edited by John Whittier-Ferguson.




T. S. Eliot and Organicism


Book Description

"T. S. Eliot and Organicism covers new ground by demonstrating that a thorough understanding of Eliot's engagement with agriculture and the environment is vital to our interpretation of his work. This book makes an important contribution to environmental modernism and establishes that Eliot had a pivotal role in the emergence of the organic movement"--




T. S. Eliot's Romantic Dilemma


Book Description

The fact that Eliot disapproved of Romanticism is clear from his critical essays, where he often appears to reject it absolutely. However, Eliot’s understanding of the term and his appreciation of literature developed and altered greatly from his adolescence to his years of scholarly study, yet he was never unable to dismiss Romanticism entirely as a critical issue. This study, first published in 1985, analyses Eliot’s approach and criticism to Romanticism, with an analysis of The Waste Land, adding to the layers of its meaning, context and content to the poem. This title will be of interest to students of literature.




Routledge Library Editions: T. S. Eliot


Book Description

This set reissues 10 books on T. S. Eliot originally published between 1952 and 1991. The volumes examine many of Eliot’s most respected works, including his Four Quartets and The Waste Land. As well as exploring Eliot’s work, this collection also provides a comprehensive analysis of the man behind the poetry, particularly in Frederick Tomlin’s T. S. Eliot: A Friendship. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.




T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems


Book Description

T. S. Eliot once stated that the supreme poet "in writing himself, writes his time". In saying that, he honoured Dante and Shakespeare, but this pithy remark fittingly characterises his own work, including The Ariel Poems, with which he promptly and pointedly responded to the problems of his times. Published with unwavering regularity, a poem a year, the Ariels were composed in the period when Eliot was mainly writing prose; and, like his prose, they reverberated with diverse contemporary issues ranging from the revision of the Book of Common Prayer to the translations of Heidegger to the questions of leadership and populism. In order to highlight the poems' historical specificity, this study seeks to outline the constellations of thought connecting Eliot’s poetry and prose. In addition, it attempts to expose the Ariels’ shared arc of meaning, an unobtrusive incarnational metaphor determining the perspective from which they propose an unorthodox understanding of the epoch— an underlying pattern of thought bringing them together into a conceptually discrete set. This is the first study that both universalizes and historicises the series, striving to disclose the regular without suppressing the random. Approaching the series as a system of orderly disorder, the notion very much at home with chaos theory, it suggests new intellectual contexts, offering interpretations that are either fresh, or significantly reangled.




Eliot Now


Book Description

Over a dozen new volumes of T. S. Eliot's poetry, prose, and letters have been published in the past decade. This collection presents unabashedly fresh approaches to Eliot, while simultaneously guiding readers through the new materials that are available for the first time outside of restricted archives. Eliot, the figurehead of literary modernism, continues to be someone whom critics love to hate (Misogynist! Reactionary! Anti-Semite!) and readers love to devour (Profound! Revolutionary! Resonant!). Why does one artist elicit such different responses? Eliot Now collects new and established voices in Eliot studies, integrating contemporary critical approaches with careful attention to the newly published materials. Whether grappling with the controversial new two-volume Poems, narrating the experience of opening Eliot's letters in the Emily Hale papers (until 2020 the “most famous sealed archive in the world”), or rereading his works through ecocritical or trans studies lenses, Eliot Now shows how this most effusively celebrated and heatedly criticized 20th-century writer continues to change the way we read literature in the 21st century. The collection concludes with six award-winning contemporary poets considering the influence of The Waste Land on poetry today.




T. S. Eliot


Book Description

One of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot is generally regarded as a leading exponent of the literary movement which came to be known as Modernism. In this volume, Harriet Davidson collects key recent essays by such internationally renowned critics as Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert, Jacqueline Rose, Jeffrey Perl, Christine Froula, Maud Ellmann, and Michael North, placing Eliot's work centrally in the context of postmodern critical theory. Eliot's writing is often perceived as incompatible with or resistant to new theoretical approaches, but this volume demonstrates the continuity between Eliot's own theoretical writings and contemporary theory, and illuminates his poetry with imaginative readings from deconstructive, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist perspectives. Headnotes to the essays and a bibliography which lists other informative readings make this book an invaluable guide to all students of twentieth-century poetry, and to scholars interested in the relationship between critical and creative writing.




Approaches to Organic Form


Book Description

Frederick Burwick's modest but comprehensive and insightful intro duction is preface enough to these sensible essays in the history and philosophical criticism of ideas. If we want to understand how some in quiring and intelligent thinkers sought to go beyond mechanism and vitalism, we will find Burwick's labors of assembling others and reflect ing on his own part to be as stimulating as anywhere to be found. And yet his initial cautious remark is right: 'approaches', not 'attainments'. The problems associated with clarifying 'matter' and 'form' are still beyond any consensus as to their solution. Even more do we recognize the many forms and meanings of 'form', and this is so even for 'organic form'. That wise scientist-philosopher-engineer Lancelot Law Whyte struggled in a place neighboring to Burwick's, and his essay of thirty years ago might be a scientist's preface to Burwick and his colleagues: see Whyte'S Accent on Form (N. Y., Harper, 1954) and his Symposium of 1951 Aspects of Form (London, Percy Lund Humphries 1951; and Indiana University Press 1961), itself arranged in honor of D' Arcy Thompson's classical monograph On Growth and Form. Philosophy and history of science must deal with these issues, and with the mixture of hard-headedness and imagination that they de mand.




Recent Books