Modernist Poet TS Eliot

This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.

TS Eliot "The Wasteland"


Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church .
(follow the hyperlink to the rest of the biography)

"The Wasteland" is TS Eliot's most culturally significant poem (I said so!) however, it's a challenge. This hyperlink provides extensive notes on the poem.

Jamaica Kincaid

Link to interview with Jamaica Kincaid and biography: Autobiographical Dynamics (TM) and Jamaica Kincaid.

William Wordsworth- Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Virginia Woolf Biography

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) hyperlink to the [extended biography]

Virginia Woolf, born in London on January 25, 1882, was the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie Stephen, a literary critic and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography . Woolf, growing up at the family estate at Hyde Park Gate, was educated at home by her father. Despite her protected childhood, Woolf had a life infused with tragedy. Her mother died when she was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, Woolf's half sister, died two years later. Leslie Stephen, her father, suffered a slow death from cancer. When Woolf's brother Toby died in 1906, she suffered a prolonged mental breakdown. Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister, Vanessa, and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury, which would laster become central to the activities of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite, influential society that helped place Woolf at the center of literary society.

Virginia Woolf A Room of Ones Own

Virginia Woolf Modernist English writer hyperlink.

Virginia Woolf, one of the founders of the movement known as Modernism, is one of the most important woman writers in English. Her "stream-of-consciousness" essays and novels provide an invaluable insight into both her own life experiences and those of women at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), and her most recognized work, A Room of One's Own (1929).

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay, based on Woolf's lectures at a women's college at Cambridge University in 1928. In it, Woolf addresses her thoughts on "the question of women and fiction," interpreted by Woolf as many questions. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf ponders the significant question of whether or not a woman could produce art of the high quality of Shakespeare. In doing so, she examines women's historical experience as well as the distinctive struggle of the woman artist.

William Blake

Hyperlink to William Blake biography.

As a child, Blake viewed the world in the light of what Wordsworth, in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality, would later call a “visionary gleam.” When he was about nine, he told his parents he had seen “a tree filled with angels” on one of his walks; he later reported a similar vision of “angelic figures walking” in a field among workers as they gathered in the hay (Gilchrist 1: 7). Unlike the child in Wordsworth’s poem, however, Blake never outgrew these visions. He was past fifty when he described seeing the rising sun as “an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty” (Erdman 566).

Portrait of Blake, engraved by Schiavonetti after Phillips, 1808. (image/hyperlink)

Modernist Experiment

Norton Anthology hyperlink to the Modernist Experiment.

In England, this outbreak of modernist experiment influenced a loosely interrelated network of groups and individuals, many of them based in London. In anglophone literature, “modernism” more nearly describes an era than a unitary movement. But what connects the modernist writers—aside from a rich web of personal and professional connections—is a shared desire to break with established forms and subjects in art and literature. Influenced by European art movements, many modernist writers rejected realistic representation and traditional formal expectations. In the novel, they explored the Freudian depths of their characters’ psyches through stream of consciousness and interior monologue. In poetry, they mixed slang with elevated language, experimented with free verse, and often studded their works with difficult allusions and disconnected images. Ironically, the success of modernism’s initially radical techniques eventually transformed them into the established norms that would be resisted by later generations.

Victorian Age

Norton Anthology hyperlink to the Victorian Age.

A sense of dizzying change characterized the Victorian period. Perhaps most important was the shift from a way of life based on ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution, as this shift was called, had created profound economic and social changes, including a mass migration of workers to industrial towns, where they lived in new urban slums. But the changes arising out of the Industrial Revolution were just one subset of the radical changes taking place in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain — among others were the democratization resulting from extension of the franchise; challenges to religious faith, in part based on the advances of scientific knowledge, particularly of evolution; and changes in the role of women.

Romantic Period

Norton Anthology hyperlink to the Romantic Period.

In a letter to Byron in 1816, Percy Shelley declared that the French Revolution was "the master theme of the epoch in which we live" — a judgment with which many of Shelley's contemporaries concurred. As one of this period's topics, "The French Revolution: Apocalyptic Expectations," demonstrates, intellectuals of the age were obsessed with the concept of violent and inclusive change in the human condition, and the writings of those we now consider the major Romantic poets cannot be understood, historically, without an awareness of the extent to which their distinctive concepts, plots, forms, and imagery were shaped first by the promise, then by the tragedy, of the great events in neighboring France.