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“... Why shouldn’t Jackself do the same? Polley’s fourth collection, which won last year’s T.S. Eliot Prize, is a story sequence of 34 poems set in the phantasmagoric Cumbrian farmland of Lamanby. Picador calls it a ‘fictionalised autobiography’ in reiver country, and it ventriloquises the Jacks of English folklore, incorporating nursery rhymes, riddles ...”

“... rather read books by women from their own culture. ‘Why should Wordsworth, Whitman, T.S. Eliot or Ted Hughes mean anything special to we people of the Caribbean?’ Evaristo also dramatises forms of differential treatment within communities, examining the ways her black characters see one another. Watching Amma’s play, Carole is conscious that she ...”

“... a different relation of life to death within his very language’. Ricks’s criterion is wit, as Eliot describes it in his essay on Marvell. Ricks says: Whether Beckett’s French is as apt an instrument as his English, or rather his Irish English, and whether this would be because of something about Beckett or about French: these are less important than ...”

“... for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its meaning, or its feeling, even in the ...”

“... Arnold and Eliot ensured that the magic of monarchy and superstition permeated English literary criticism and education like a syrupy drug ... ’ Yes, this is Tom Paulin speaking. Readers of the London Review will remember the review of a collection of essays on Geoffrey Hill in which he bitterly attacked the conservatism of English poetry and criticism ...”

“... the intolerable Arthur Calvert in Late Call. There are traces of him all over the place. Even Bill Eliot, that successful barrister and adoring husband in The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, has a touch of him in his gambling and the financial irresponsibility that leaves his widow almost destitute. Sir Angus tells us that he felt ...”

“... did should the public know about it? The reluctance of his estate to authorise a biography of T.S. Eliot is a British cultural scandal as were the impediments put in the way of Peter Ackroyd when he embarked on a life of the poet. The author of another biographical study of Eliot was granted permission to quote only after ...”

“... and-genius): the early 20th century. She discusses Zelda Fitzgerald and ‘Vivien(ne)’ Eliot, as well as a number of other ‘women often marginalised in the modernist memory project’, whom she calls her ‘eternal reference point … an invisible community’. Heroines is narrated by a voice that is never identified as ‘Kate Zambreno’, yet ...”

“... and The Golden Bowl. After his death in 1916 his reputation rose steadily, buoyed by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the 1920s and later by R.P. Blackmur and Lionel Trilling among other critics, who brought about the ‘James Revival’ which began in the 1940s and is still going strong. James did much in his lifetime to build up a name a developer could ...”

“... bookshop, Shakespeare & Company: One evening a crowd gathered in Sylvia’s bookshop to hear T.S. Eliot read some of his own poems. Joyce sat near Eliot, his eyes concealed under his dark glasses, silent, motionless, head bowed a little, eyes closed most of the time, as I could plainly see from my chair a few feet away in ...”

“... Browning (‘Oh, to be in England’), Linton Kwesi Johnson (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) and T.S. Eliot (‘History is now and England’). I had got as far as setting out the rationale for such a book in a lecture at the British Academy when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by Paul Keegan and Christopher Ricks ...”

“... which does best from the deal; the city may even be ‘the image of time itself’. From T.S. Eliot – ‘a poet whose vision of time and eternity sprang directly from his experience of London’ – Ackroyd quotes the line ‘all time is unredeemable,’ adding that ‘London is unredeemable, too.’ In his 1993 LWT London Lecture, Ackroyd expressed his ...”

“... obscurity is combined with an unusually heightened degree of awareness. No doubt this is what T.S. Eliot had in mind when he said that poets were both more primitive and more sophisticated than the average run of individuals. If God spans the whole of Creation, Peter Conrad runs him a close second. This is an astonishingly erudite work, one which would still ...”

“... I doubt that they ever found a large audience outside the academy or a few literary circles (T.S. Eliot and H.D. were two who fell under their influence). In the wider world, Harrison’s reputation rested on her public performances, where she stripped away the technicalities and was (as she put it herself in Reminiscences) ‘almost fatally ...”

“... English poet since Shakespeare to find a wholly new way of conveying think-speak in metre (T.S. Eliot was probably the second). This is clearest in ‘Felix Randal’, but is thoroughly evident too in such an oddly memorable poem as ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’ (‘The Eurydice, it concerned thee O Lord’). The trouble is that this colloquialism can ...”