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“... 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 ...”

“... poisoned the minds of the ‘neo-Christian’ literary critics of the past generation, with T.S. Eliot at the vanguard, and they in turn are eager to poison the minds of students by twisting courageous, radical works of art into expressions of a rancid piety. In Empson’s very Nietzschean account, Christianity celebrates the ‘unnatural’; it has a deadly ...”

“... a pattern of ‘timeless moments’, but what does Mr Baker make of the years since 1942 when T.S. Eliot stood in the failing winter light of his ‘secluded chapel’ and knew so surely that ‘History is now and England’? Mr Baker shows a marked tendency to opt out. He declares the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II his formal end-point, but has trouble ...”

“... to be mindful of the survival here of an old England lived in by people like the middle-aged T.S. Eliot, exponents of a disgusted chastity. So the piece was solicitous in trying to alleviate the shocks by explaining that the novelist himself was shocked. And I think it was right to argue that the book has its ‘strict disclaimers’ and that goodness of ...”

“... central heating and agriculture. Like Hitler, he condemned jazz as decadent. When T.S. Eliot came for a private audience Pacelli lectured him on literature. When Orson Welles came he pretended to a vast knowledge of Hollywood gossip. Similarly, he claimed to be fluent in almost every European language, though Evelyn Waugh noted that all he could ...”

“... short-circuit this sometimes produces is as revealing (thanks for pointing out that echo of T.S. Eliot, Paul!) as it is disconcerting (shouldn’t we have seen that for ourselves?). How much of Muldoon does depend on picking up what are essentially in-jokes? Never mind the content, the very form of a Muldoon poem is likely to constitute a coded ...”

“... engravers who processed his illustrations and, to wrap things up, a ‘lost entry’ in George Eliot’s journal, recording ‘Mr Thackeray’s passing’. This last was clearly inspired by Peter Ackroyd’s imaginary conversation between Chatterton, T.S. Eliot, Dickens and Oscar Wilde in his biography of the Great ...”