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“... poets in different eras have been fond of rare words, as the recent examples of Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens will suggest.) Finally, it does no justice whatever to the richness of this particular text to think, for example, of the transcendent meteorological and zoological panorama of the Voice from the Whirlwind as a ‘compendium list’. We ...”

“... and became the sacrificial muses who inspired his poetry.’ Lowell grew up revering T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound (‘I ask you to have me,’ he wrote to Pound as a college freshman), but in the 1950s, famous after the publication of the technically masterful Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, he started to feel stultified by the modernism ...”

“... first detective novel’, was published in 1862, six years before The Moonstone, which T.S. Eliot, not altogether correctly, called ‘the first, the longest and the best’ of detective novels. The Female Detective, a collection of stories, came soon afterwards in 1864, and Revelations of a Lady Detective the same year; all were serialised. The Notting ...”

“... with literature into rational generalisations about the way everyone thinks and feels.What T.S. Eliot observed of his own critical assertions also applies to Johnson’s: ‘I am convinced that their force comes from the fact that they are attempts to summarise, in conceptual form, direct and intense experience of the poetry that I have found most ...”

“... and the English Language’ and with the ‘plain English’ therapists for whom the austere T.S. Eliot had his own apocalyptic vision just before Orwell uttered his, seeing language asshabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,Undisciplined squads of ...”

“... of the great are delineated for posterity by the Chronicle. Balanchine, Ingmar Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest ...”

“... The author has written a biography of Yeats and critical studies of Orwell, Lawrence and T.S. Eliot. Bunting knew Yeats and Eliot; he may or may not have met Orwell. He truly detested Lawrence, first for locking him out on a window-ledge at a party (in Paris, I think) and then for slipping him some hashish baked into a ...”

“... authority to miracles which had been reported in Flemish villages. In 1606, on his deathbed, the test which any self-respecting Stoic must pass, he renounced the ‘vanities’ of pagan philosophy in favour of the Cross, and asked that his prize possession, his furred robes, be placed at the altar of the Church of St Peter in Louvain. To posterity, the ...”

“... to his literary or contemporary allusions. Who but a pedant would say of Shakespeare what T.S. Eliot wrote of Jonson, that he ‘cannot be understood without study’? Eliot was enjoining an immersion in Jonson’s writings, not in their intellectual hinterland, but the explanatory apparatus of the new edition brings ...”

“... opposition’ not a feature of Parliament in the 18th century.11 February. A piece in the TLS by Laura Freeman about how hunger was reflected in the novels of the postwar period. I suppose it’s because it’s to do with novels (and therefore middle class and upwards), but it hardly relates to my own childhood memories. I have no particular memories ...”

“... High Holborn, and he incorporated into his verse Baudelaire’s words (soon to be reused by T.S. Eliot) ‘Mon semblable, mon frère’. Aldington could mix ‘Helen of Sparta,/ Dryope, Laodamia’ with ‘a whore in Oxford street’, but generally his Greece represents an ideal of love and beauty that isn’t always convincing when the diction is that of ...”

“... and Auden himself evidently felt he had been knocked about a bit. ‘Desmond MacCarthy took me to task severely,’ he told a young admirer back home in New York: ‘He’s the Grand Old Man of English criticism … now the publishers over there are advertising it as “that controversial volume”.’ Auden had endured controversy anyway since his move to ...”

“... art of winning friends and influencing people, recalls in his preface to The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot (1960) that ‘at my one meeting with Mr Eliot, I offered to complete a book on his literary career without pestering him.’ When Kenner did inevitably pester, Eliot proved himself ...”

“... contains an excursus on ‘Belief and Poetry’ in the form of a challenging discussion with T.S. Eliot and his notion of poetry as ‘the emotional equivalent of thought’. This essay was among the first and remains the most illuminating of the many studies in which critics have portrayed Rilke as ‘the poet of a world of which the philosopher is ...”

“... by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as an unsavoury mix of the ‘oriental’ and the ...”