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A Hundred Years of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

By Kevin Dettmar

Sometime during the early days of September, 1919, T. S. Eliot —just thirty years old and working as a clerk in the foreign-exchange division of Lloyds Bank in London—sat down and wrote his manifesto as a poet and critic, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Its effects were hardly immediate. The essay appeared in the September and December, 1919, issues of The Egoist , the London-based little magazine for which Eliot had been serving as an assistant editor since June, 1917. These would turn out to be the last issues that the magazine would publish. A “Notice to Readers” in the December issue announced a hiatus for 1920; the editor Harriet Shaw Weaver wanted to focus her energies on publishing books. That pause would prove to be a full stop. Not many could have been disappointed at the announcement: The Egoist , by its end, boasted a print run of just four hundred, and a mere forty-five subscribers. In “ Paradise Lost ,” Milton argued for the sufficiency of a “fit audience . . . though few”—but there are limits.

Though “Tradition” was initially seen only by a coterie audience, it is Eliot’s most important essay—and arguably, the most influential English-language literary essay of the twentieth century. From that modest début, its reach has grown exponentially. Within a year, the piece was included in Eliot’s first critical collection, “ The Sacred Wood ,” published in November, 1920. It subsequently appeared in the three other volumes assembled by Eliot, including “ Selected Essays ,” which itself went through three different editions. In that collection, “Tradition” has the pole position.

And it wasn’t the first choice of Eliot alone. “ The Norton Anthology of English Literature ,” that canon-creating textbook par excellence, has included the essay in every one of its ten editions, dating back to 1962; in that first edition, Eliot is the only twentieth-century poet whose criticism is represented. “Tradition” is further reproduced in all nine editions of Norton’s American-literature anthology (as an American expatriate, Eliot is hard on taxonomies, and both the British and the Americans tend to claim him) and many other literature textbooks. The essay has been an important part of the literature survey curriculum for more than half a century. “Tradition” is the criticism that critics read when they’re figuring out that they want to be critics. In the literature and literary criticism of the twentieth century, it’s simply unavoidable.

In 1919, Eliot could boast only a thin volume of poems and a handful of essays and reviews, but he had confidence to spare. In a letter sent to his mother, back in St. Louis, in March of that year—six months, that is, before he published the first essay he would deem worthy of reprinting—he wrote, “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James.” It’s an outlandish claim, even if one allows for the kind of hyperbole to be found in a letter meant to impress one’s parents. (To be fair, he does go on to admit, “All this sounds very conceited. . . . ”) “Tradition” is stamped with the voice of a young man intoxicated with a belief in his own authority; as he wrote in that same letter, “I can have more than enough power to satisfy me.” In “Tradition,” we first see him flex those muscles.

The essay is a challenge to the conventions of early twentieth-century literary criticism. Eliot’s most concise statement of his thesis comes at the start of the December installment: “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” That literary criticism should focus on texts might seem axiomatic; that it ought not pay attention to the author is perhaps less obvious. Eliot is reacting to a wave of criticism in which study of the poet had too often been substituted for study of the poetry—an orientation sometimes known as biographical criticism and which, in the generation following Eliot’s essay, would be dubbed the “biographical fallacy.” In Chapter 2 of “ Ulysses ,” Stephen Dedalus’s employer, Mr. Deasy, lectures him about frugality: “But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse .” Stephen mutters a single word under his breath in response: “Iago.” Stephen is, after his fashion, pushing back against the biographical fallacy. “Shakespeare” didn’t “say” that; rather, it was voiced by perhaps the most monstrous of all his characters. Iago’s statement reflects nothing, necessarily, about Shakespeare’s own values and judgments. As Eliot writes of the poet in general, “emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.” And this applies not just to named literary characters—the “I” that speaks in lyric poetry is also a character, not entirely coincident with the writer who formed that character on the page. “The more perfect the artist,” Eliot insists, “the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” This is the creative license that makes imaginative literature possible. And, in 1919, Eliot thought it to be in jeopardy.

“Tradition” is filled with mannerisms that become familiar across the body of Eliot’s critical writing. For instance, he betrays a particular fondness for the vast generalization and the unsupported assertion—unsupported, that is to say, but for the magisterial tone and sonorous sweep of his prose. Take, for instance, the opening gambit of “Tradition”: “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.” Before the era of big data and text mining, what would evidence for such a claim even look like? By means of that “we” (not the royal “we” so much as the faux-communal “we”), Eliot as much as suggests that this is conventional wisdom—what kind of a pedant would insult our intelligence by proving it? Likewise, two years later, in “The Metaphysical Poets,” he will insist, making a virtue of necessity, “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult .” One of the most daring critical pronouncements of Eliot’s career—the assertion that difficulty isn’t an unfortunate artifact but actually the litmus test of advanced writing—is just dropped on the page as if it were too painfully obvious to warrant discussion. The scholar Leonard Diepeveen aptly describes this feature of Eliot’s critical prose: “Though he regularly asserts the need for evidence, Eliot doesn’t often provide it.”

What makes “Tradition” such a durable touchstone? In it, Eliot essentially declares Romanticism dead to rights, insinuating that modernism (without employing that label) is the new king. (His friend, the poet-critic T. E. Hulme, had already performed the autopsy roughly seven years earlier, in his essay “Romanticism and Classicism”—but Hulme was killed in the First World War, and the piece wasn’t published until 1924.) William Wordsworth , in the key text of Romantic poetics, the preface to “ Lyrical Ballads ,” from 1800, had urged that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility.” (Which is nothing if not categorical—unproven and unprovable. Eliot wasn’t the only poet partial to such pronouncements.) In “Tradition,” Eliot explicitly rejects that formula, calling it “inexact”: “it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility.” Rather, Eliot insists, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” And then the rim-shot, at which Eliot excelled: “But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Just as he was inspired by the work of Hulme, Eliot was doubtless jolted by the fiery rhetoric of one young Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ” (also serialized in The Egoist , in 1914-15). Stephen, with confidence to spare himself, declared, “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” There is good reason to doubt that Joyce, in 1915, took this stance quite as seriously as his autobiographical hero did; but if Stephen’s declaration was meant ironically, Eliot certainly didn’t hear it that way. In his hands, rather, this becomes the “impersonal theory of poetry”: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

Wait, what? The success as a poet is measured by the erasure of his personality? Eliot’s suggestion is both outlandish and already, in 1916, a critical commonplace. If Wordsworth promoted self-expression as the quintessence of poetry, his contemporary John Keats, in private correspondence, expressed concerns about what he called “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.” Keats referred to himself as a “camelion Poet”: “the poet has . . . no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.” Keats, in 1818, had already propounded his own “impersonal theory of poetry,” one that Eliot certainly knew.

It’s a convention of poetry treatises to provide a memorable image of the poet and his role. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “ Defence of Poetry ” (written in 1821 and published posthumously, in 1840), the poet is something like an unconscious medium connecting the spirit and human realms. For Eliot, the poet doesn’t serve as a medium but has a medium: “The poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express,” Eliot writes, “but a particular medium . . . and not a personality.” Certainly, Eliot knew how to create a memorable image. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the first of his poems to garner widespread attention, does so from the get-go with the shocking conceit of its opening lines: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table. . . . ” In “Tradition,” his image of the poet is equally outré: “I . . . invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.”

That is the last sentence of the September installment of the essay—a real cliff-hanger, by literary-critical standards. Eliot solves the riddle for us early in the December conclusion: “The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.” That is to say, it’s a catalyst; it creates the conditions under which the two gases combine to form a new compound. (Critics would point out that the resulting compound is not, as Eliot states, sulphurous acid, but sulphur trioxide. But never mind that.) The catalyst, the platinum, isn’t affected by the reaction, nor does any trace of it appear in the new compound—but without it, the reaction does not take place. It is, as Shelley writes of the poet, “the influence which is moved not, but moves.”

So poetry, in Eliot’s description, has nothing to do with self-expression or inspiration or originality, as usually understood; the measure of the poet’s art is the pressure he brings to bear on those raw materials, those chemical precursors. And, in turn, literary criticism, when it’s doing its job properly—for every poetic manifesto is also, none too subtly, a set of instructions for critics—leaves the private life of the poet to one side. Many have pointed out how this is a convenient position for Eliot to adopt, given that he had recently begun work on “ The Waste Land ”—a poem full of autobiographical detail from which he was anxious to distance himself, including anguished dialogue closely modelled on, if not directly quoted from, his first wife Vivien Haigh-Wood.

In another of Eliot’s descriptions, the mind of the poet is “a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” On this score as well, the essay would seem to be clearing important ground (consciously or not) for “The Waste Land,” a pastiche of quotations and echoes and parodies—a poem that carried footnotes, for heaven’s sake, so nervous was Eliot about being accused of plagiarism. The chemistry-lab metaphor is ostentatiously scientific, or at least pseudo-scientific; Eliot’s science envy is on display as well in his 1923 review of “Ulysses,” in which he writes that Joyce’s contemporary use of classical myth “has the importance of a scientific discovery.” In one of the best-known maxims from the previous generation of art critics, Walter Pater (in another unsupported assertion) had declared that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” In “Tradition,” Eliot closely echoes—the better to reject—Pater’s claim: “in this depersonalisation . . . art may be said to approach the condition of science.”

Eliot’s argument is encapsulated in the duelling poles of his title, which might almost read “Tradition vs. the Individual Talent.” In that fight, Eliot is rooting for what he sees as the underdog, tradition—the foundational essay of modern literary criticism is fundamentally conservative. Eliot is also, quietly, biting the hand that feeds him (and writes his paycheck). The Egoist carried a subtitle, “An Individualist Review”; in its pages, Eliot seeks to put individualism in its place. Louis Menand , in his 1987 book about Eliot, points out the perverse bad manners of such a move, describing Eliot in this period as “critiquing the avant-garde in the leading avant-garde forum of the day . . . provoking those writers on their own ground and as one of their number.”

In the essay’s other most striking image (and claim), Eliot suggests that each work of art is part of a vast trans-historical system, a sort of virtual bookshelf containing “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer”—one that might, at any moment, be rearranged by “the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art.” “The existing order is complete,” Eliot explains, “before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.” Which is to suggest, rather counterintuitively, that artistic influence runs both ways across time: the past is “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” The author David Lodge makes use of this paradox in his 1984 academic farce “ Small World ,” whose young academic Persse McGarrigle is writing a Master’s thesis on “The Influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare.” The title is both a joke—part of Lodge’s satire—and not.

Looking back with the hindsight of a hundred years, it’s now possible to see Eliot’s remarks on the reciprocal nature of influence as one of the earliest attempts to formulate what would come to be called “intertextuality”—the notion that to write is always to echo other writing (and thereby to alter that earlier writing by wrestling it into new contexts). Roland Barthes, in his rhapsodic 1967 essay “ The Death of the Author ,” claims that “the text is a tissue of quotations . . . a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” Barthes’s multi-dimensional space sounds for all the world like Eliot’s description of the mind of the poet—but it’s even more purely impersonal than what Eliot had imagined. The space is no longer conceived as existing within the poet, but without. It’s the text itself.

Fifty years after Eliot’s manifesto, French cultural theorists like Barthes and Michel Foucault (in “ What Is an Author? ” from 1969)—as their titles might suggest—took Eliot’s impersonality theory to the nth degree, planting a post- in front of his modernism and humanism. If, for Eliot, the author was a kind of flesh-and-blood beaker, for the French poststructuralists, the author was purely a fiction, a heuristic device—what Foucault called the “author function.” Meanwhile, fifty years after the death of the author was announced and a century after Eliot’s belated obituary for Romanticism, “Tradition” still pulses with energy and life, what the poststructuralists would have called jouissance . Whether the influence is direct or indirect—whether a given literary essay has been influenced by Eliot’s critical brio, or by one who has been influenced by it—literary criticism today everywhere bears his impress.

Even more directly, Eliot the schoolmaster continues to influence students of literature. The pedagogical strategy of “close reading” that evolved in Eliot’s wake, wherein students are taught to focus exclusively on the words on the page—and taught that the “I” of “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is not Wordsworth but the poem’s speaker, a literary character—these are the starting points of every consequential contemporary literary-critical argument. The kind of close reading for which Eliot was arguing in 1919 remains the foundation of literary criticism in 2019—even if critics now think of it as a starting point, not a terminus. Thus, as W. H. Auden wrote about the legacy of W. B. Yeats, “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

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By Louis Menand

By Paul Grimstad

By James Wood

The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition

The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition gathers for the first time in one place the collected, uncollected, and unpublished prose of one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. Highlights include all of Eliot's collected essays, reviews, lectures, and commentaries from The Criterion; essays from his student years at Smith Academy, Harvard, and Oxford; and his Clark and Turnbull lectures on metaphysical poetry. Each item has been textually edited, annotated, and cross-referenced by an international group of leading Eliot scholars, led by Ronald Schuchard, a renowned scholar of Eliot and Modernism.

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In this Volume

Vol. 1: Apprentice Years, 1905-1918

• edited by Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard
• Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
• View Citation

Vol. 2: The Perfect Critic, 1919-1926

• edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard

Vol. 3: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927-1929

• edited by Frances Dickey and Jennifer Formichelli and Ronald Schuchard

Vol. 4: English Lion, 1930-1933

• edited by Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard

Vol. 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934-1939

• edited by Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard and Jayme Stayer

Vol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946

• edited by David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard

Vol. 7: A European Society, 1947-1953

• edited by Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard

Vol. 8: Still and Still Moving, 1954-1965

Table of contents table of contents table of contents table of contents table of contents table of contents table of contents table of contents.

• The Perfect Critic, 1919-1926: Introduction
• Pages: xiii-xli

• Editorial Procedures and Principles
• Pages: xliii-l
• Acknowledgments
• Pages: li-liv
• List of Abbreviations
• Pages: lv-lvii
• List of Illustrations
• Pages: lix-lx
• The New Elizabethans and the Old: A review of The New Elizabethans: A First Selection of the Lives of Young Men Who Have Fallen in the Great War, by E. B. Osborn
• Pages: 10-15
• The Post-Georgians: A review of Wheels: A Third Cycle , ed. Edith Sitwell
• Pages: 16-20
• American Literature. A review of A History of American Literature, vol. II , ed. William P. Trent, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van Doren
• Pages: 21-25
• A Romantic Aristocrat
• Pages: 26-32
• Kipling Redivivus. A review of The Years Between, by Rudyard Kipling
• Pages: 33-39
• Kipling Redivivus. To the Editor of The Athenaeum
• A Sceptical Patrician. A review of The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography
• Pages: 41-47
• Beyle and Balzac. A review of A History of the French Novel, to the Close of the Nineteenth Century, vol. II, by George Saintsbury
• Pages: 48-53
• Criticism in England. A review of Old and New Masters, by Robert Lynd
• Pages: 54-59
• The Education of Taste. A review of English Literature during the Last Half-Century , by J. W. Cunliffe
• Pages: 60-65
• Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]. A review of Naked Warriors , by Herbert Read; The Charnel Rose, Senlin: A Biography, and Other Poems, by Conrad Aiken; and vingt-cinq poèmes, by Tristan Tzara
• Pages: 66-71
• A Foreign Mind: A review of The Cutting of an Agate, by W. B. Yeats
• Pages: 72-76
• The Romantic Generation, If It Existed. A review of Currents and Eddies in the English Romantic Generation, by Frederick E. Pierce
• Pages: 77-82
• “Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama
• Pages: 83-91
• Was There a Scottish Literature? A review of Scottish Literature: Character and Influence , by G. Gregory Smith
• Pages: 92-96
• Christopher Marlowe
• Pages: 97-104
• Tradition and the Individual Talent
• Pages: 105-114
• Swinburne as Critic
• Pages: 115-121
• Pages: 122-128
• Murmuring of Innumerable Bees. An unsigned review of Coterie: An Illustrated Quarterly, 2
• Pages: 129-131
• Humanist, Artist, and Scientist: A review of La Pensée italienne au XVIe siècle et le courant libertin, by J.-Roger Charbonnel
• Pages: 132-136
• War-paint and Feathers: A review of The Path on the Rainbow: An Anthology of Songs and Chants from the Indians of North America , ed. George W. Cronyn
• Pages: 137-140
• The Method of Mr. Pound: A review of Quia Pauper Amavi, by Ezra Pound
• Pages: 141-146
• Our Inaccessible Heritage: To the Editor of The Athenaeum
• Pages: 147-148
• Mr. Pound and His Poetry: To the Editor of The Athenaeum
• Pages: 150-164
• The Preacher as Artist. A review of Donne’s Sermons: Selected Passages , ed. Logan Pearsall Smith
• Pages: 165-169
• The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama
• Pages: 170-175
• The Local Flavour
• Pages: 176-180
• Swinburne as Poet
• Pages: 181-186
• William Blake
• Pages: 187-192
• The Phoenix Society. To the Editor of The Athenaeum
• Pages: 193-194
• Euripides and Professor Murray
• Pages: 195-201
• A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry
• Pages: 202-211
• Modern Tendencies in Poetry
• Pages: 212-225
• Pages: 226-237
• The Criticism of Poetry. To the Editor of the TLS
• Pages: 238-239
• The Poetic Drama. A review of Cinnamon and Angelica: A Play by John Middleton Murry
• Pages: 240-243
• Philip Massinger
• Pages: 244-259
• Artists and Men of Genius. To the Editor of The Athenaeum
• Pages: 260-261
• The Perfect Critic
• Pages: 262-272
• The Perfect Critic. To the Editor of The Athenaeum
• Pages: 273-274
• A French Romantic. To the Editor of the TLS
• Pages: 275-277
• The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
• Pages: 278-285
• A Note on the American Critic
• Pages: 286-290
• The French Intelligence
• Pages: 291-293
• Introduction: The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
• Pages: 294-299
• Autobiographical Note. Harvard College Class of 1910, Secretary's Fourth Report
• Pages: 300-301
• The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism
• Pages: 302-305
• The Lesson of Baudelaire
• Pages: 306-308
• Andrew Marvell
• Pages: 309-323
• Prose and Verse
• Pages: 324-332
• London Letter: March, 1921
• Pages: 333-340
• London Letter: May, 1921
• Pages: 341-349
• John Dryden
• Pages: 350-361
• London Letter: July, 1921
• Pages: 362-368
• London Letter: September, 1921
• Pages: 369-374
• The Metaphysical Poets
• Pages: 375-385
• The Metaphysical Poets. To the Editor of the TLS
• Pages: 386-388
• Poets and Anthologies. To the Editor of the TLS
• Pages: 388-389
• The Three Provincialities
• Pages: 390-393
• London Letter: April, 1922
• Pages: 394-398
• Lettre d’Angleterre
• Pages: 399-405
• London Letter: June, 1922
• Pages: 406-410
• London Letter: August, 1922
• Pages: 411-415
• To the Editor of The Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury
• Pages: 416-417
• Marie Lloyd
• Pages: 418-423
• Lettre d’Angleterre: Le style dans la prose anglaise contemporaine (Dec 1922)
• Pages: 424-429
• To the Editor of The Daily Mail
• Pages: 430-431
• To the Literary Editor of The Chicago Daily News
• Dramatis Personae
• Pages: 433-437
• To the Literary Editor of The Globe and Commercial Advertiser
• Pages: 438-439
• John Donne. A review of Love Poems of John Donne
• Pages: 440-444
• Ben Jonson. To the Editor of The Nation and The Athenaeum
• The Function of a Literary Review
• Pages: 446-447
• Contemporary English Prose
• Pages: 448-454
• Andrew Marvell. A review of Miscellaneous Poems, by Andrew Marvell
• Pages: 455-457
• The Function of Criticism
• Pages: 458-468
• The Classics in France – and in England
• Pages: 469-470
• The Beating of a Drum. A review of Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama, by Olive Mary Busby; and The Sacred Dance: A Study in Comparative Folklore by W.O.E. Oesterley
• Pages: 471-475
• Ulysses , Order, and Myth. A review of Ulysses, by James Joyce
• Pages: 476-481
• A Preface to Modern Literature: Being a Conspectus, Chiefly of English Poetry, Addressed to an Intelligent and Inquiring Foreigner
• Pages: 482-488
• Pages: 489-494
• Marianne Moore. A review of Poems, by Marianne Moore
• Pages: 495-499
• To the Editor of The Transatlantic Review
• Pages: 500-502
• Four Elizabethan Dramatists: A Preface to an Unwritten Book
• Pages: 503-512
• A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors:1 Writers Who, Though Masters of Thought, are Likewise Masters of Art
• Pages: 513-520
• A Commentary (Apr 1924)
• Pages: 521-528
• A Commentary (July 1924)
• Pages: 529-535
• An untitled review of The Growth of Civilization and The Origin of Magic and Religion, by W. J. Perry
• Pages: 536-538
• A Commentary (Oct 1924)
• Pages: 539-545
• Preface to Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century
• Pages: 546-547
• A Neglected Aspect of Chapman
• Pages: 548-558
• A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry
• Pages: 559-566
• A Commentary (Jan 1925)
• Pages: 567-571
• On the Eve: A Dialogue [with Vivien Eliot]
• Pages: 572-575
• A Commentary (Apt 1925)
• Pages: 576-592
• The Ballet. A review of The Dance: An Historical Survey of Dancing in Europe, by Cecil J. Sharp and A. P. Oppé and Mudrās: The Ritual Hand-Poses of the Buddha Priests and Shiva Priests, by Tyra De Kleen
• Pages: 581-584
• Pages: 585-588
• Why Rural Verse1. A review of Spring Thunder and Other Poems by Mark Van Doren
• Pages: 589-591
• Autobiographical Note. Harvard College Class of 1910, Quindecennial Report
• English Satire. An unsigned review of English Satire and Satirists by Hugh Walker
• Pages: 593-595
• An Italian Critic on Donne and Crashaw. An unsigned review of Secentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra: John Donne – Richard Crashaw, by Mario Praz
• Pages: 596-599
• Shakespeare and Montaigne. An unsigned review of Shakspeare’s Debt to Montaigne by George Coffin Taylor
• Pages: 600-602
• Wanley and Chapman. An unsigned review of Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vol. XI, collected by Oliver Elton
• Pages: 603-608
• The Clark Lectures. Lectures on the Metaphysical Poetry of the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Donne, Crashaw and Cowley
• Lecture I: Introduction
• Pages: 610-627
• Lecture II: Donne and the Middle Ages
• Pages: 628-647
• Lecture III: Donne and the Trecento
• Pages: 648-668
• Lecture IV: The Conceit in Donne
• Pages: 669-685
• Lecture V: Donne’s Longer Poems
• Pages: 686-704
• Lecture VI: Crashaw
• Pages: 705-724
• Lecture VII: Cowley and the Transition
• Pages: 725-741
• Lecture VIII: The Nineteenth Century: Summary and Comparison
• Pages: 742-761
• The Idea of a Literary Review
• Pages: 762-767
• A Popular Shakespeare. An unsigned review of The Works of Shakespeare. Vols I-III. Introductions by Charles Whibley
• Pages: 768-770
• Introduction to Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem, by Charlotte Eliot1
• Pages: 771-776
• A Commentary (Apr 1926)
• Pages: 777-780
• Mr. Robertson and Mr. Shaw: A review of Mr. Shaw and “The Maid,” by J. M. Robertson
• Pages: 781-782
• An untitled review of All God’s Chillun Got Wings (with Desire under the Elms and Welded) by Eugene O’Neill
• Pages: 783-784
• A Commentary (June 1926)
• Pages: 785-789
• English Verse Satire. An unsigned review of A Book of English Verse Satire , ed. A. G. Barnes
• Pages: 790-794
• The Influence of Ovid. An unsigned review of Ovid and his Influence , by Edward Kennard Rand
• Pages: 795-796
• The Author of “The Burning Babe.” An unsigned review of The Book of Robert Southwell , by Christobel M. Hood
• Pages: 797-800
• Plague Pamphlets. An unsigned review of The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker , ed. F. P. Wilson
• Pages: 801-804
• Creative Criticism: An unsigned review of Creative Criticism. Essays on the Unity of Genius and Taste, by J. E. Spingarn
• Pages: 805-806
• Chaucer’s “Troilus”. An unsigned review of The Book of Troilus and Criseyde , by Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Robert Kilburn Root
• Pages: 807-811
• American Prose. An unsigned review of The Outlook for American Prose, by Joseph Warren Beach; and S. P. E. Tract No. XXIV, which includes Notes on Relative Clauses, by Otto Jespersen, and American Slang , by Fred Newton Scott
• Pages: 812-816
• Lancelot Andrewes
• Pages: 817-829
• A Commentary (Oct 1926)
• Pages: 830-833
• Mr. Read and M. Fernandez. A review of Reason and Romanticism: Essays in Literary Criticism , by Herbert Read; and Messages, by Ramon Fernandez
• Pages: 834-842
• Note sur Mallarmé et Poe
• Pages: 843-847
• Hooker, Hobbes, and Others. An unsigned review of The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Thinkers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. F. J. C. Hearnshaw
• Pages: 848-851
• Massinger. An unsigned review of Étude sur la collaboration de Massinger avec Fletcher et son groupe, by Maurice Chelli; and Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ed. A. H. Cruickshank
• Pages: 852-855
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A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ is an essay by T. S. Eliot; it began life as an address Eliot gave to the Shakespeare Association on 18 March 1927 before being published on 22 September of that year. Although it is Eliot’s poetry that has endured, and his reputation as a perceptive and provocative critic has dwindled slightly since the 1920s, this short essay demonstrates the precise qualities that made Eliot such an original and valuable thinker.

‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’: summary

Eliot argues that every new generation tends to reinvent ‘Shakespeare’, finding a new way to discuss the poet and playwright, often in ways which are far removed from the reality. In Eliot’s opinion, it is a good thing that new interpretations of Shakespeare’s work, examining his writing through different lenses, come along, not because these new readings are any closer to the truth, but because they at least succeed in making the older erroneous interpretations unfashionable.

Having sketched out how previous critics and biographers have endeavoured to show how Shakespeare was influenced by different Renaissance thinkers – the French essayist Montaigne, and the Italian political philosopher Machiavelli – Shakespeare proposes his own new approach to Shakespeare, which involves acknowledging the importance of stoicism, as it is outlined in the prose writings of the ancient Roman writer Seneca, in Shakespeare’s plays.

Stoicism is the philosophical belief that we should accept that there are things in the world that we cannot change, and to minimise the effect that harmful things can have on us accordingly.

In other words, we simply refuse to let them affect us. With his tongue in his cheek, Eliot declares that he is only proposing such a new approach in the hope that it will prevent such a theory being put forward by someone else in the future.

Eliot freely acknowledges that Shakespeare almost certainly never read any of Seneca’s philosophical works in prose, which are ‘dull’; he also admits that Seneca’s plays, which Shakespeare had probably encountered (at grammar school), don’t really reflect the stoical approach to life. But Shakespeare may have encountered the principles of stoicism at second- or third-hand, via other writers.

Comparing Shakespeare to the medieval Italian poet Dante, Eliot argues that neither poet did any real thinking, for that ‘was not their job’: instead, they drew upon the thought of their times, such as the theology of St Thomas in Dante’s case.

Both Shakespeare and Dante are great poets, but Shakespeare’s poetry is often great even though the philosophy underpinning it is, in Eliot’s view, inferior to the thought underpinning Dante’s poetry. The important thing is that both Dante and Shakespeare express timeless human emotions through their poetry.

Eliot makes the famous pronouncement that ‘The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time.’ Both Dante and Shakespeare express ‘private failures’, ‘rage’, or ‘disappointments’, but they ‘metamorphose’ or transform these into something universal and reflective of the age in which the poets live.

Shakespeare had an ability to draw upon ideas that were current during his lifetime and create great poetry out of them, and these ideas include the stoicism of Seneca, which was already widely disseminated throughout Shakespeare’s world, so finds its way into his work in all sorts of ways.

‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’: analysis

‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ begins in a rather casual or even flippant manner, with Eliot stating that he wishes to propose the idea of Shakespeare as a Senecan stoic if only to prevent the idea from taking hold in literary-critical circles. But Eliot goes on to advance his thesis in some detail, revealing it to be a matter to which he has devoted considerable thought.

Eliot sees the stoicism of ancient Rome re-emerging in the Renaissance, and this stoicism informs the growing self-consciousness which Eliot detects in many of Shakespeare’s heroes, including Hamlet and Othello. This is a new attitude, which leads, ultimately, to the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas were still relatively new when Eliot was writing.

Fundamentally, the stoical attitude derived – albeit indirectly – from Seneca which Eliot detects in much Renaissance drama, including the plays of Shakespeare, is an attitude of ‘self-dramatisation’. Usually this attitude manifests itself most explicitly during the great final speeches of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes: when Othello dies, or Hamlet speaks to Horatio before dying (‘The rest is silence’), for example.

The Shakespearean tragic hero to whom Eliot pays the closest attention in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ is Othello, whose dying words reveal a man who is ‘ cheering himself up ’ (Eliot’s emphasis). Othello is trying to escape reality, the world immediately around him, in his dying moments, and taking his mind off Desdemona, his wife whom he has murdered in the erroneous belief she had been unfaithful to him. Instead of thinking about what he has done to Desdemona, Othello turns his thoughts to himself .

He dramatises himself as a method of coping with what he has done, and through self-dramatising he shows his determination to ignore reality and to ‘see things as they are not’.

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Home › Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Metaphysical Poets

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Metaphysical Poets

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 5, 2020 • ( 1 )

There are a handful of indisputable influences on Eliot’s early and most formative period as a poet, influences that are corroborated by the poet’s own testimony in contemporaneous letters and subsequent essays on literature and literary works. Foremost among those influences was French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, from whom Eliot had learned that poetry could be produced out of common emotions and yet uncommon uses of language and tone. A close second would undoubtedly be the worldrenowned Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri, whose influences on Eliot’s work and poetic vision would grow greater with each passing year.

A third influence would necessarily come from among poets writing in Eliot’s own native tongue, English. There, however, he chose not from among his own most immediate precursors, such as Tennyson or Browning, or even his own near contemporaries, such as W. B. Yeats or Arthur Symons, and certainly not from among American poets, but rather from among poets and minor dramatists of the early 17th century, the group of English writers working in a style and tradition that has subsequently been identified as metaphysical poetry.

The word metaphysical is far more likely to be found in philosophical than literary contexts. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophical inquiry and discourse that deals with issues that are, quite literally, beyond the physical (meta- being a Greek prefix for “beyond”). Those issues are, by and large, focused on philosophical questions that are speculative in nature—discussions of things that cannot be weighed or measured or even proved to exist yet that have acquired great importance among human cultures. Metaphysics, then, concerns itself with the idea of the divine, of divinity, and of the makeup of what is called reality.

That said, it may be fair to suspect that poetry that is metaphysical concerns itself with those kinds of issues and concerns as well. The difficulty is that it both does and does not do that. Thus, the question of what metaphysical poetry does in fact do is what occupies Eliot’s attention in his essay to the point that he formulates out of his considerations a key critical concept that he calls the dissociation of sensibilities.

Eliot’s essay on the English metaphysical poets was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement as a review of a just-published selection of their poetry by the scholar Herbert J. C. Grierson titled Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler . In a fashion similar to the way in which Eliot launched into his famous criticism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in “Hamlet and His Problems” by using an opportunity to review several new works of criticism on the play as a springboard to impart his own ideas, Eliot commends Grierson’s efforts but devotes the majority of his commentary otherwise to expressing his views on the unique contribution that metaphysical poetry makes to English poetry writing in general and on its continuing value as a literary movement or school. Indeed, as if to underscore his opposition to his own observation that metaphysical poetry has long been a term of either abuse or dismissive derision, Eliot begins by asserting that it is both “extremely difficult” to define the exact sort of poetry that the term denominates and equally hard to identify its practitioners.

After pointing out how such matters could as well be categorized under other schools and movements, he quickly settles on a group of poets that he regards as metaphysical poets. These include John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Henry Cowley, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and Bishop King, all of them poets, as well as the dramatists Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur.

As to their most characteristic stylistic trait, one that makes them all worthy of the title metaphysical, Eliot singles out what is generally termed the metaphysical conceit or concept, which he defines as “the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it.”

Eliot knows whereof he speaks. He himself was a poet who could famously compare the evening sky to a patient lying etherized upon an operating room table without skipping a beat, so Eliot’s admiration for this capacity of the mind—or wit, as the metaphysicals themselves would have termed it—to discover the unlikeliest of comparisons and then make them poetically viable should come as no surprise to the reader.

Eliot would never deny that, while it is this feature of metaphysical poetry, the far-fetched conceit, that had enabled its practitioners to keep one foot in the world of the pursuits of the flesh, the other in the trials of the spirit, such a poetic technique is not everyone’s cup of tea. The 18th-century English critic Samuel Johnson, for example, found their excesses deplorable and later famously disparaged metaphysical poetic practices in his accusation that in this sort of poetry “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Eliot will not attempt to dispute Johnson’s judgment, though it is clear that he does not agree with it. (Nor should that be any surprise either. Eliot’s own poetic tastes and techniques had already found fertile ground in the vagaries of the French symbolists, who would let no mere disparity bar an otherwise apt poetic comparison.)

Rather, Eliot finds that this kind of “telescoping of images and multiplied associations” is “one of the sources of the vitality” of the language to be found in metaphysical poetry, and then he goes as far as to propose that “a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry.” What that means, by and large, is that these poets make combining the disparate the heart of their writing. It is on that count that Eliot makes his own compelling case for the felicities of metaphysical poetry, so much so that he will eventually conclude by mourning its subsequent exile from the mainstream of English poetic practice. It is this matter of the vitality of language that the metaphysical poets achieved that most concerns Eliot, and it is that concern that will lead him, in the remainder of this short essay, not only to lament the loss of that vitality from subsequent English poetry but to formulate one of his own key critical concepts, the dissociation of sensibility.

The “Dissociation of Sensibility”

Eliot argues that these poets used a language that was “as a rule pure and simple,” even if they then structured it into sentences that were “sometimes far from simple.” Nevertheless, for Eliot, this is “not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling,” one that brings about a variety of thought and feeling as well as of the music of language. On that score—that metaphysical poetry harmonized these two extremes of poetic expression, thought and feeling, grammar and musicality —Eliot then goes on to ponder whether, rather than something quaint, such poetry did not provide “something permanently valuable, which . . . ought not to have disappeared.”

For disappear it did, in Eliot’s view, as the influence of John Milton and John Dryden gained ascendancy, for in their separate hands, “while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude.” By way of a sharp contrast, Eliot saw the metaphysical poets, who balanced thought and feeling, as “men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility,” becoming thereby poets who can “feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” Subsequent English poetry has lost that immediacy, Eliot contends, so that by the time of Tennyson and Browning, Eliot’s Victorian precursors, a sentimental age had set in, in which feeling had been given primacy over, rather than balance with, thought. Rather than, like these “metaphysical” poets, trying to find “the verbal equivalents for states of mind and feeling” and then turning them into poetry, these more recent poets address their interests and, in Eliot’s view, then “merely meditate on them poetically.” That is not at all the same thing, nor is the result anywhere near as powerful and moving as poetic statement.

While, then, the metaphysical poets of the 17th century “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” Eliot imagines that subsequently a “dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Nor will the common injunction, and typical anodyne for poor poetry, to “look into our hearts and write,” alone provide the necessary corrective. Instead, Eliot offers examples from the near-contemporary French symbolists as poets who have, like Donne and other earlier English poets of his ilk, “the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.” To achieve as much, Eliot concludes, a poet must look “into a good deal more than the heart.” He continues: “One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

The point of this essay is not a matter of whether Eliot’s assessment of the comparative value of the techniques of the English metaphysical poets and the state of contemporary English versification was right or wrong. By and large, Eliot is using these earlier poets, whom the Grierson book is more or less resurrecting, to stake out his own claim in an ageless literary debate regarding representation versus commentary. Should poets show, or should they tell? Clearly, there can be no easy resolution to such a debate.

Eliot would be the first to admit, as he would in subsequent essays, that a young poet, such as he was at the time he wrote the review at hand, will most likely condemn those literary practices that he regards to be detrimental to his own development as a poet. Whatever Eliot’s judgments in his review of Grierson’s book on the English metaphysical poets may ultimately reveal, they are reflections more of Eliot’s standards for poetry writing than of standards for poetry writing in general. That said, they should serve as a caution to any reader approaching an Eliot poem, particularly from this period, since he makes it clear that he falls on the side of representation as opposed to commentary and reflection in poetry writing.

In addition to its having enabled Eliot to stake out his own literary ground by offering, as it were, a literary manifesto for the times, replete with a memorable critical byword in the coinage dissociation of sensibility, as Eliot’s own prominence as a man of letters increased, this review should finally be credited with having done far more, over time, than Grierson’s scholarly effort could ever have achieved in bringing English metaphysical poetry and its 17th-century practitioners back to some measure of respectability and prominence. For that reason alone, this short essay, along with Tradition and the Individual Talent and Hamlet and His Problems , has found an enduring place not only in the Eliot canon but among the major critical documents in English of the 20th century.

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International T. S. Eliot Society

History of the Society

Where we start from: tradition and the t. s. eliot society.

This essay was written in 2014 by David E. Chinitz and published in T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe , ed. Jayme Stayer (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015). It is reproduced here—with additional notes and minor edits—by permission of the editor. Sources in the Works Cited list are linked.

Founded in the 1980s as “a living and continuing memorial” to Eliot, the Society has about 180 members, two thirds of them from North America, the rest from twenty countries from the United Kingdom and continental Europe to Japan and South Korea, with intermediary stops in Eastern Europe, India, and the Middle East.

Though based in the United States, the Eliot Society had an international dimension from its beginning. The Society originated in the determination of a talented and enthusiastic immigrant, Leslie Konnyu, to have a monument to Eliot erected in the city of the poet’s birth. Born Könnyü László in Tomási, Hungary, Konnyu (1914–1992) had fled the Soviet occupation of his homeland and had been living in St. Louis since 1949, drawn to the city both for its immigrant community and because of his partiality for Eliot. Originally a teacher, he made his living in the United States as a cartographer; he was also a published poet and the author of books on Hungarian and Hungarian-American literature. Although he commissioned, at his own expense, a sculpture of Eliot by fellow immigrant Andrew Osze, hoping to persuade his adopted city to accept this tribute to Eliot as a gift, his efforts were repeatedly thwarted by bureaucratic indifference.

In 1983, however, Konnyu’s activities yielded unanticipated results when they came to the attention of Jewel Spears Brooker through a short article in the Tampa Tribune. Her interest piqued by the story of his frustrated exertions, Brooker, who taught in the English Department at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, reached out to Konnyu. She discovered that for several years he had been leading a discussion group of local— which, for Konnyu, meant international—friends who met annually in his living room to discuss Eliot’s work. After examining her scholarship, Konnyu invited Brooker to join this group (in which membership was then conferred by invitation) and to deliver the 1984 keynote. Following her address, which was given in the public library, a Hungarian pianist of Konnyu’s acquaintance entertained the audience with tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats , then a brand-new musical, and Konnyu took up a collection to pay Brooker’s plane fare.

Joining forces with Konnyu, Brooker energetically built up the St. Louis group into a large and vibrant society, using her own money and contacts to send out notices and personally recruiting Eliot scholars such as Grover Smith and Ronald Schuchard as well as younger academics. Over the next several years she courted major scholars for the annual keynote address (officially the “T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture”) and worked with the St. Louis group to formalize the association. The T. S. Eliot Society was legally incorporated on December 2, 1986. Its beginnings in a collaboration between an aficionado and a scholar established a pattern for the Society that has persisted for three decades.

In 1988 the Society put on a major international program to mark Eliot’s centennial. Without grants, and with minimal institutional support, Brooker and Konnyu managed to bring together exhibits, musical and dramatic performances, poetry readings, and presentations by Cleanth Brooks, Michael Yeats, Russell Kirk, A. D. Moody, George Bornstein, and many others. When a star for Eliot was added to the St. Louis Walk of Fame the next year, Konnyu accepted the recognition on the poet’s behalf. He died three years later and did not live to see his original dream fulfilled in 2010 with the erection of a bust of Eliot (by another immigrant sculptor, Vlad Zhitomirsky) at the intersection of Euclid and McPherson. The Writers’ Corner established there by the Central West End Association commemorates two other denizens of the neighborhood, Tennessee Williams and Kate Chopin, together with Eliot. The T. S. Eliot Society contributed to the Eliot sculpture using monies that had been set aside at its founding and earmarked for just such a use. The Society has in fact maintained Konnyu’s tradition by supporting the establishment of public memorials several times, lobbying successfully in 1998 for a historical plaque at 4446 Westminster Place, Eliot’s adolescent home in St. Louis, and funding the restoration in 2007 of the northwest window in St. John’s Church, Little Gidding.

For its first decade and more, the Eliot Society met annually in St. Louis on the weekend closest to the poet’s September 26 birth date. The first break in that pattern came in 1999 with a meeting in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the young Eliot had passed the summers with his family. This successful visit to the site of The Dry Salvages led naturally to an ambitious plan to bring the Society across the Atlantic to tour the scenes of the remaining three Quartets. In June 2004, the annual meeting convened for a week in London, with excursions by bus to Burnt Norton, East Coker, and Little Gidding. 

Proximity drew to this London meeting British and continental scholars who had never ventured to the American Midwest. One of these, the French modernist scholar William Marx, joined the Eliot Society again in St. Louis the following year and suggested the idea of a future meeting in Paris, which he generously volunteered to host. This invitation created an irresistible opportunity to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Eliot’s formative year in Paris, 1910–11. A July 2011 meeting in La Ville-Lumière eventuated.

As it has since the days of Jewel Brooker’s leadership, the Eliot Society takes seriously its mission to encourage scholarship on Eliot. An allied organization of the Modern Language Association, the Society has sponsored panels at the MLA’s annual convention on such topics as “Eliot and Transnationalism,” “Eliot and Violence,” and “Eliot, H.D., and New England.” The Society has likewise been active in organizing panels at the American Literature Association’s annual conference and at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900.  

The Society’s own annual meeting provides many opportunities for discussion of Eliot’s life, work, and thought through panels, peer seminars, lectures, banquets, and performances. Attendance is typically between 50 and 60, although the 2011 meeting in Paris drew over 80 participants. The highlight of the annual meeting is the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, given each year by an eminent academic or poet. Past speakers have included, for example, the scholars Michael Levenson, Marjorie Perloff, Jahan Ramazani, and Helen Vendler; the poets Geoffrey Hill and Carl Phillips; and, in Eliot’s own mold, such poet-critics as Robert Crawford and James Longenbach. The Memorial Lecture remains, as Leslie Konyuu first conceived it, free and open to the public. 

Time Present , the Society’s newsletter (published thrice annually until the move to web-only publication in 2022), included news, book reviews, abstracts of conference papers, an annual bibliography, and other information of interest to Eliot scholars. The newsletter was mailed to the Society’s members; back issues are archived, for public and scholarly use, here and in the “resources and projects” section of our website. The website publishes relevant news and information on the Eliot Society and its activities and helps publicize Eliot-related activities taking place around the world—for example, the production of one of Eliot’s plays in New York, or the planning of a conference in Edinburgh or Florence.

Perhaps Leslie Konnyu’s most lasting bequest to the institution he founded—one that goes back to the early gatherings in his living room—is a pervasive atmosphere of congeniality that endures even now in the Eliot Society’s activities. It is probably because of that warmth that many scholars who intended to come once to the annual gathering in St. Louis have found themselves returning regularly for years. Although this quality suffuses the Society’s intellectual proceedings, it shows through especially clearly in such after-hours traditions as the Saturday-night sing-along—at which selections from Cats are now strictly forbidden—and late-night cocktail parties. As the original cadre of St. Louisans in Leslie Konnyu’s circle diminishes, the Eliot Society is undergoing a period of generational transition. Though its practices will inevitably evolve, one hopes that the hospitable and rather boisterous spirit of its early years will continue to pilot the Society through a future in which it finds itself, as Eliot himself counsels, “still and still moving.”

Works Cited

Brooker, Jewel Spears. “ Winking Back at the Stars .” T. S. Eliot Society News and Notes 16 (1992): 1.

“ Életmu” [Oeuvre] . Könnyü László hagyatéka Tamásiban [Legacy of Leslie Konnyu in Tamási]. Tamási Cultural Centre, 2003. Web.

Smith, Grover. “ The T. S. Eliot Society: Celebration and Scholarship, 1980-1999. ” Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1999. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale, 2000.

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T.S. Eliot Exemplar Essay - Module B HSC English Advanced

The following essay was written by Fenna Kroon, Project's English Resourcer!

English Advanced Module B Exemplar Essay - T.S. Eliot

Module b essay question.

“When you engage with works of quality you often feel, and continue to feel, that your internal planes have shifted, and that things will never quite be the same again.”

To what extent does this statement resonate with your considered perspective of TS Eliot's poetry？

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HSC English Exemplar Essay Response

Good literature has the power to take us as readers on a journey with the author. This is evident in TS Eliot's modernist suit of poetry TS Eliot: Selected Poetry, particularly 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' (Love Song) (1915) as well as ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). These texts and their use of literary devices provide readers with a glimpse into another perspective from a time long gone. As a result, our own views and internal planes are challenged and altered. This change is permanent, exposing readers to ideas beyond their own. Thus, these poems have shaped the views of countless individuals and will continue to do so to a large extent.

When confronted with literature that is challenging and engaging, the individual has no option but to ponder its central messages. In ‘Love Song’, Eliot establishes this through prolific use of the Flanuer, connoisseur of the streets and a lonely, observing wanderer. Created within a context of mass urbanisation and mechanisation, this figure walks through new streets and society that is continually changing. Personally, this poem was finished shortly after the death of Eliot's close friend, Jean Verdenel in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and hence this poem encapsulates the futility of conflict as well as modern society. This is evident in the opening lines as the flaneur says “Let us go then you and I / as the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherised on a table.” This stark and confronting juxtaposition mirrors that of the title where 'love song', with musical and romantic connotations, is juxtaposed with 'J Alfred Prufrock' as a proper noun. This consequently results in readers immediately feeling uncomfortable as their expectations for what to expect within traditional poetry are crushed. Exacerbated through repetition as he writes “There will be time, there will be time.”, Eliot comments on how his society has made him passive, procrastinating the search for meaning with temporary satisfactions. He further comments on British high society, questioning whether “Should I, after tea and cake and ices, have the strength to force this moment to its crisis?”. Here, Eliot and the flaneur are begging themselves to find the strength to create their own meaning in society. Thus, they reach out to the audience to change their ways，acting as a cautionary tale for the ambivalence the two experience. Finally, this is exemplified as Eliot writes “I have seen moments of my greatness flicker” and the visual connotation of achievements as flickering like a candle indicate how Eliot believes that a modernist society inhibits individuals from being their own person and finding meaning. As John Xiros Cooper so effectively summarised, “[modernist society] make us passively abject.” This highlights how Eliot's context minimised his ability to find peace and understanding. Within a world of upheaval, the individual becomes lost. Reading this as a contemporary audience, it is impossible to ignore our own suffocating society of change. Consequently, this poem allows for readers to understand the futility of their attempts of finding the meaning of life and existence. This ultimately shifts their internal understanding irrevocably and unchangingly.

Further, the futility of life and religion leave readers with no guidance or advice in finding continuity. This is evident in Eliot's The Hollow Men, which uses an extended metaphor of the river Styx (the purgatorial border between life and death) and intertextual references to establish the meaningless nature of a life without faith. After suffering a nervous breakdown and institutionalisation in 1921, this poem is a manifestation of this desolation and pain. Evident as he writes “This is the dead land. This is the cactus land.” the allusion to Dante's Divine Comedies, a text discussing hell and purgatory, it becomes evident that the setting of the poem is one of indecision and judgement. This is further established through the epigraph alluding to Guy Fawkes, “A penny for the old guy”and to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as he writes “Mistah Kurtz - he dead”. Both these allusions discuss legacy and how you're remembered once you die. Fawke's death is celebrated by children to this day, with Mr Kurtz repenting on his deathbed, begging “What have I done?”. Consequently, Eliot's inclusion of these two epigraphs at the beginning of his poem create lingering questions of what death means and what an unsatisfying life means. Hence, as he writes “We are the Hollow men. We are the stuffed men.”, the inclusive language of ‘we’ draws all readers into the discussion of whether they've lived a worthy life. Eliot links this to religious pursuits as he writes “Lips that should kiss / form prayers to broken stone”. This alludes to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, comparing their romance to the paradoxical nature of religion. Providing both a mechanism for damnation in Hell as well as eternal salvation，Eliot questions whether a religious life would in any form change his circumstance. Xiros Cooper effectively expands on this, arguing that “We are not surprised when it ends with a defeated stammer”. Essentially, Eliot's consistent allusions to other texts and metaphors to being ‘hollow’ create a questioning persona surrounding life and religion and its influence on judgement. Consequently, readers are forced to go on this journey with Eliot as they engage with this poem, considering their own answers relating to life, death and purgatory. And, once these questions are in your head, they are impossible to get out.

Having considered Eliot's suite as a whole，it is evident that his poetry impacts readers on a fundamental level because it discusses issues pertinent to everyone. This is particularly true for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollow Men, discussing the dangers of a changing society and purgatory itself respectively. As a result, the reader's understanding of themselves and their broader society is fundamentally and permanently altered.

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Module B Essay – T.S Eliot

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The quest for understanding and enlightenment is futile within the constraints of empty societal constructs. T.S Eliot’s oeuvre of poems depicts the tension between the vacuity of modern European society and the universal journey for self-discovery, fabricating a canonical piece that is inherently laced with textual integrity. Eliot exposes the detriments of modernism on the psyche in ‘ The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock ’ (1910), ‘ The Hollow Men ’ (1925) and ‘ The Journey of the Magi ’ (1927), as his synthesis of form, content and rhetoric subtly reflects his own search for identity. Written during an era of disintegrating forces that fragment the conventions of romanticism, Eliot captures the despair of early modernist society in his critical portrayal of societal constructs. Sustained throughout Eliot’s corpus is the struggle to escape the pervasiveness of monotony with the culmination of Eliot’s quest in ‘Magi’ exposing the ultimate truth that religion cannot sufficiently fulfill the vacuum of meaning society has torn. Hence, Eliot forges a timeless body of literature in his representation of society as an everlasting obstacle in the pursuit of personal meaning.

Societal constructs impose a blanket of triviality that suffocates the potential for enlightenment. The dramatic monologue ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ upholds textual integrity through its lasting depiction of the impact of shifting social contexts on the psyche. Modernism saw a rejection of religious guidance, with the collapse of spiritual affirmation increasing individuals’ desire for social validation. The conflict between tradition and change, as romanticism moved to modernism, is epitomized in the intertextual epigraph, as Eliot draws on the classic Dante’s Inferno (1476) to employ an objective correlative between the narcissism of Guido and the titular Prufrock. The extended allusion to the epigraph echoed in Prufrock’s obsession with his image confirms that the motif of an ‘overwhelming question’ is centered upon embracing introspection. The parenthetical insertion ‘(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)’, structurally interrupts the stanza, symbolising the disruptive nature of self-consciousness in achieving self-discovery. The stultifying effect of a spiritual vacuum is captured in the conduplicatio; “Prepare a face to meet the faces” with the repetition expressing the monotonous cycle of urban life. Prufrock ultimately avoids the ‘overwhelming question,’ instead escaping his journey to self-discovery by preoccupying himself with trivial facades noted in the rhetorical question; “Shall I part my hair behind?’ The poem’s canonical status is invoked through Eliot’s exploration of the universal tension between the imperative yet confronting nature of introspection, exposing the complex quest for meaning in the modern world.

The powerful omnipresence of societal constructs limit self-actuated enlightenment. Eliot’s revolutionary piece ‘The Hollow Men’, employs a free-verse form to reflectively encapsulate his profound realisation that modern society is a formation of purposeless facades. Written months after a psychotic breakdown, the paradoxical anaphora; “We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men,” symbolically portrays Eliot’s acknowledgement of the modern man’s inability to connect with new constructs that ‘stuff’ us with false meaning. While Eliot embodies pessimistic naturalism, theorist David Buckley argues that the subtly threaded biblical allusions, noted in “fading star”, displays Eliot and the hollowmen’s quest for unified meaning. The dichotomies that plague Eliot’s context, with the challenge of Romanticism and Modernism, Religion and Naturalism, solipsism and omniscience, coalesce a paradoxical narrative in ‘The Hollowmen’ as Eliot ridicules societal constructs only to entertain the notion of religion. The ellipsis in; ‘For Thine is; Life is; For Thine is the…” insinuates a tone of contemplation, as the direct repetition connecting ‘Life’ to the religious ‘Thine’ combines literary elements to imply the promising prospect of faith in achieving a cathartic awakening. The dialectic layers evoke a sense of confusion that mirrors Eliot’s personal identity crisis, maintaining textual integrity while expressing the premise that humans are inescapably surrounded by cycles of tedium. Thus, ‘The Hollow Men’ canonically portrays the premise that the modern man will no longer search within but search throughout societal constructs for meaning.

While religion is classically displayed as the key to self-discovery, societal constructs prevail as an obstacle in the path of spiritual fulfillment. ‘Journey of the Magi’ captures Eliot’s spiritual awakening as he grapples with his religious conversion. The restrictive facades of society exemplified in ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Hollowmen’ are reflected in the declarative; ‘We regretted the summer palaces on slopes.’ The Romantic tone created by the sibilance is contrasted by the connotations of ‘regret’, where Eliot concludes to separate himself from societal constructs such as these ‘palaces’ to reach true meaning. However, Eliot’s portrayal of Jesus’s epiphanic birth is satirized through the use of low modality and flippant tone; ‘it was (you might say) satisfactory,’ revealing the judgement that religion offers little consolation. In fact, at the culmination of the poem, the Magi must return to society, ‘but [are] no longer at ease ,’ representative of Eliot’s despondency with the modern world’s obsession with logicality and technology at the expense of higher cultural and spiritual meaning. The truncated final line; ‘I should be glad of another death,’ exerts a sense of hopelessness espousing Eliot’s ultimate loss of confidence in the quest for self-discovery

Within the modern world self-discovery is futile. Eliot’s collection of poems expose the tediums and detriments of the new world that has shifted from the comforts of romanticism. The desire for identity and spiritual awakening is hindered by the masks individuals and society create to evoke a sense of false meaning. ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘The Hollow-men’ display the impacts of society on individual enlightenment whilst ‘The Journey of the Magi’ cynically rejects religion as a final answer. Eliot’s dark analysis of self-discovery amplified by his personal ennui, insinuates the emptiness of humanity’s societal and religious constructs, maintaining a canonical status and textual integrity.

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Critic’s Notebook

Like My Book Title? Thanks, I Borrowed It.

Literary allusions are everywhere. What are they good for?

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By A.O. Scott

You see it everywhere, even if you don’t always recognize it: the literary allusion. Quick! Which two big novels of the past two years borrowed their titles from “Macbeth”? Nailing the answer — “ Birnam Wood ” and “ Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ” — might make you feel a little smug.

Perhaps the frisson of cleverness ( I know where that’s from!), or the flip-side cringe of ignorance ( I should know where that’s from! ), is enough to spur you to buy a book, the way a search-optimized headline compels you to click a link. After all, titles are especially fertile ground for allusion-mongering. The name of a book becomes more memorable when it echoes something you might have heard — or think you should have heard — before.

This kind of appropriation seems to be a relatively modern phenomenon. Before the turn of the 20th century, titles were more descriptive than allusive. The books themselves may have been stuffed with learning, but the words on the covers were largely content to give the prospective reader the who (“Pamela,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Frankenstein”), where (“Wuthering Heights,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “Treasure Island”) or what (“The Scarlet Letter,” “War and Peace,” “The Way We Live Now”) of the book.

Somehow, by the middle of the 20th century, literature had become an echo chamber. Look homeward, angel! Ask not for whom the sound and the fury slouches toward Bethlehem in dubious battle. When Marcel Proust was first translated into English, he was made to quote Shakespeare, and “In Search of Lost Time” (the literal, plainly descriptive French title) became “Remembrance of Things Past,” a line from Sonnet 30 .

Recent Proust translators have erased the Shakespearean reference in fidelity to the original, but the habit of dressing up new books in secondhand clothing persists, in fiction and nonfiction alike. Last year, in addition to “Birnam Wood,” there were Jonathan Rosen’s “ The Best Minds ,” with its whisper of Allen Ginsberg’s “ Howl ,” Paul Harding’s “ This Other Eden ” (“ Richard II ”), and William Egginton’s “ The Rigor of Angels ” (Borges). The best-seller lists and publishers’ catalogs contain multitudes ( Walt Whitman ). Here comes everybody! (James Joyce).

If you must write prose and poems, the words you use should be your own. I didn’t say that: Morrissey did, in a deepish Smiths cut (“ Cemetry Gates , ” from 1986), which misquotes Shakespeare and name-checks John Keats, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde — possibly the most reliably recycled writers (along with John Milton and the authors of the King James Bible) in the English language.

Not that any of them would have minded. When Keats wrote that “ a thing of beauty is a joy forever ,” he surely hoped that at least that much of “ Endymion ” would outlive him. It’s a beautiful sentiment! And he may have been right. Does anyone read his four-part, 4,000-line elegy for Thomas Chatterton outside a college English class, or even for that matter inside one? Nonetheless, that opening line may ring a bell if you remember it from the movies “ Mary Poppins ,” “Yellow Submarine” or “ White Men Can’t Jump .”

Wilde’s witticism and bons mots have survived even as some of his longer works have languished. If it’s true (as he said) that only superficial people do not judge by appearances, maybe it follows that shallow gleaning is the deepest kind of reading. Or maybe, to paraphrase Yeats, devoted readers of poetry lack all conviction , while reckless quoters are full of passionate intensity .

Like everything else, this is the fault of the internet, which has cannibalized our reading time while offering facile, often spurious, pseudo-erudition to anyone with the wit to conduct a search. As Mark Twain once said to Winston Churchill, if you Google, you don’t have to remember anything.

Seriously though: I come not to bury the practice of allusion, but to praise it. (“ Julius Caesar ”) And also to ask, in all earnestness and with due credit to Edwin Starr , “ Seinfeld” and Leo Tolstoy : What is it good for?

The language centers of our brains are dynamos of originality. A competent speaker of any language is capable of generating intelligible, coherent sentences that nobody has uttered before. That central insight of modern linguistics, advanced by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and ’60s, is wonderfully democratic. Every one of us is a poet in our daily speech, an inglorious Milton ( Thomas Gray ), a Shakespeare minting new coins of eloquence.

Of course, actual poets are congenital thieves (as T.S. Eliot or someone like him may have said), plucking words and phrases from the pages of their peers and precursors. The rest of us are poets in that sense, too. If our brains are foundries, they are also warehouses, crammed full of clichés, advertising slogans, movie catchphrases, song lyrics, garbled proverbs and jokes we heard on the playground at recess in third grade. Also great works of literature.

There are those who sift through this profusion with the fanatical care of mushroom hunters, collecting only the most palatable and succulent specimens. Others crash through the thickets, words latching onto us like burrs on a sweater. If we tried to remove them, the whole garment — our consciousness, in this unruly metaphor — might come unraveled.

That may also be true collectively. If we were somehow able to purge our language of its hand-me-down elements, we might lose language itself. What happens if nobody reads anymore, or if everyone reads different things? Does the practice of literary quotation depend on a stable set of common references? Or does it function as a kind of substitute for a shared body of knowledge that may never have existed at all?

The old literary canon — that dead white men’s club of star-bellied sneetches ( Dr. Seuss ) — may have lost some of its luster in recent decades, but it has shown impressive staying power as a cornucopia of quotes. Not the only one, by any means (or memes). Television, popular music, advertising and social media all provide abundant fodder, and the way we read now (or don’t) has a way of rendering it all equivalent. The soul selects her own society ( Emily Dickinson ).

When I was young, my parents had a fat anthology of mid-20th-century New Yorker cartoons , a book I pored over with obsessive zeal. One drawing that baffled me enough to stick in my head featured a caption with the following words: “It’s quips and cranks and wanton wiles, nods and becks and wreathed smiles.” What on earth was that? It wasn’t until I was in graduate school, cramming for an oral exam in Renaissance literature, that I found the answer in “ L’Allegro, ” an early poem by Milton, more often quoted as the author of “Paradise Lost.”

Not that having the citation necessarily helps. The cartoon, by George Booth, depicts a woman in her living room, addressing members of a multigenerational, multispecies household. There are cats, codgers, a child with a yo-yo, a bird in a cage and a dog chained to the sofa. Through the front window, the family patriarch can be seen coming up the walk, a fedora on his head and a briefcase in his right hand. His arrival — “Here comes Poppa” — is the occasion for the woman’s Miltonic pep talk.

Who is she? Why is she quoting “L’Allegro”? Part of the charm, I now suspect, lies in the absurdity of those questions. But I also find myself wondering: Were New Yorker readers in the early 1970s, when the cartoon was first published, expected to get the allusion right off the bat? They couldn’t Google it. Or would they have laughed at the incongruous eruption of an old piece of poetry they couldn’t quite place?

Maybe what’s funny is that most people wouldn’t know what that lady was talking about. And maybe the same comic conceit animates an earlier James Thurber drawing reprinted in the same book. In this one, a wild-eyed woman bursts into a room, wearing a floppy hat and wielding a basket of meadow flowers. “I come from haunts of coot and hern!” she exclaims to the baffled company, disturbing their cocktail party.

That’s it. That’s the gag.

Were readers also baffled? It turns out that Thurber’s would-be nature goddess is quoting “ The Brook ,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. (I’ve never read it either.) Is it necessary to get the reference to get the joke? If you chuckle in recognition, and complete the stanza without missing a beat — “I make a sudden sally/And sparkle out among the fern,/To bicker down a valley” — is the joke on you?

It’s possible, from the standpoint of the present, to assimilate these old pictures to the familiar story about the decline of a civilization based in part on common cultural knowledge. Sure. Whatever. Things fall apart ( Yeats ). In the cartoons’ own terms, though, spouting snippets of poetry is an unmistakable sign of eccentricity — the pastime of kooky women and the male illustrators who commit them to paper. This is less a civilization than a sodality of weirdos, a visionary company ( Hart Crane ) of misfits. But don’t quote me on that.

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott

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In Memoriam: Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024)

The University of Chicago Press mourns the passing of Marjorie Perloff, a long-time Press author and advisor. The following obituary was prepared by her family with the assistance of Charles Bernstein and the Press.

One of the most influential American literary critics and scholars of modern and contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff died at her home in Pacific Palisades (Los Angeles), California, on March 24, according to her daughters, Carey and Nancy Perloff. 

Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz in Vienna on September 28, 1931, into a prominent intellectual Jewish family. She and her family fled Vienna on March 15, 1938, two days after the Anschluss. This escape, and their journey to America, is recounted in The Vienna Paradox (2003). Perloff’s vast knowledge of European literature, not only in her native German but also French, Italian, and Russian, combined with her love of American culture and the American avant-garde, made her a seminal critic and a beacon for students of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. 

Perloff started her career relatively late in her life.  At twenty-one, she married cardiologist Joseph Perloff (1924–2014), who became a renowned physician and the Streisand and American Heart Association professor at UCLA.  She had two children, Nancy and Carey, in her mid-twenties. Her first job was at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, writing subtitles for movies. After the family moved to Washington, DC, she earned an MA in English literature at Catholic University. Perloff relished her time at Catholic University, finding it to be a rigorous and intellectually stimulating, and she returned to CU in 1965 to get her PhD with a dissertation on “Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats” (published as a book in 1970). Perloff was offered a full-time job by CU, where she taught from 1966 to 1971. She went on to teach at the University of Maryland from 1971 to 1976 and at the University of Southern California from 1979 to 1986.

Perloff’s writing career took off with the first book on the poetry of Frank O’Hara, one of the great figures of the 50s and 60s, who, along with John Ashbery, was part of the “New York School.” Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters” (1977) secured Perloff’s status as a major voice in the contemporary poetry scene and introduced her as an influential critic of the visual arts, concrete poetry, book art, conceptual art, and the intersection of language and visual culture. Her O’Hara book was followed by The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981) , which reevaluated post-war European and American poetry. Her work over the years on John Cage, Robert Smithson, Gertrude Stein, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Ashbery, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Johanna Drucker, David Antin, and numerous other artists proved groundbreaking. She also wrote trenchant criticism on Samuel Beckett. 

Perloff’s academic career culminated in her move to Stanford University in 1986 and appointment in 1990 as the Sadie Patek Dernham Professor of Humanities. At Stanford she taught classes on everything from Pinter and Beckett to the work of Language poets such as Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein to classes on Joyce and Proust, as well as mentoring students who went on to become significant critics and scholars. Perloff also organized an important conference on and celebration of the work of Merce Cunningham and John Cage.  

Perloff became an internationally sought-after speaker and scholar with a vast knowledge of post-war literature and art, and ability to see the bigger trends that have moved culture forward. In addition to her many books, Perloff wrote scores of reviews for small magazines and scholarly publications. These reviews have been collected as Circling the Canon (two volumes, 2019). She was a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement   In 2006, Perloff served as president of the Modern Language Association. In 1997, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, she was inducted into the American Philosophical Society. Several of her many interviews have been collected in Poetics in a New Key  (2014). Perloff was also active in China, where her work was widely known and translated. In 2011 she co-founded the Chinese/American Association of Poetry and Poetics; she remained president at the time of her death. Perloff frequently lectured in China. In 2021, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art and made an Austrian citizen.  

Perloff was a maverick, refusing to go along with the latest academic trends or to see herself as disadvantaged by her status as a woman, a Jew, a mother, or a scholar without an Ivy League degree. Instead, her outsider status gave her a unique lens on literary movements. She overturned views on T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other canonized artists, always returning to her close reading and textual analysis. Perloff was fascinated by Futurism and wrote the landmark study The Futurist Moment (1986), dedicated to the magical “defamiliarization” that occurred in Russia between the wars and lifted the modernist project into an experimental sphere that left naturalism and the lyric behind. That book began her long association with the University of Chicago Press, which published it and most of her subsequent books. Her exploration of poetry and technology continued with Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media  (1992).  

Toward the end of her career, Perloff returned to the literature of her childhood, exploring the writers of the Austrian diaspora in Edge of Irony (2016),a book that brought together Paul Celan, Joseph Roth, and Karl Kraus to reveal how their own outsider status within the Hapsburg Empire gave these writers a mordant wit and despairing irony.  

Throughout this later period Perloff became more and more fascinated by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular his groundbreaking idea that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Tracing Wittgenstein’s influence on artists as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Susan Howe, and Marcel Duchamp, Perloff opened readers’ eyes to the vast energy of the modernist project. During the COVID pandemic, Perloff translated into English Wittgenstein’s secret notebooks, written in code during WW I (her edition was published as Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 in 2022). This brought her into close contact with Damion Searls, whose 2024 translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus includes an introduction by Perloff.  

What distinguishes her writings is Perloff’s insatiable curiosity, roving intelligence, linguistic dexterity, and irrepressible wit. She never took given wisdom as gospel; she was forever questioning why and how certain literary movements had come to be and what would prove to be lasting. Perloff analyzed work she loved and championed artists she felt others had ignored or misunderstood.  

Perloff is survived by her daughters Carey and Nancy, their husbands Anthony Giles and Robert Lempert,   and her grandchildren Alexandra, Ben, and Nicholas. Carey, a playwright and theater director, was the long-time Artistic Director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Nancy is a curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the author of books on the Russian avant-garde, concrete poetry, and the circle of Erik Satie. Perloff was a passionate and devoted mother and grandmother.  

Perloff leaves behind friends across the globe, from China to Israel, to whom she was devoted and whom she visited often in her travels and lectures around the world. Her books have been translated into dozens of languages, and her hundreds of articles and essays continue to be reprinted and devoured by new generations of readers. Perhaps it is Frank O’Hara who summed up her life force: she was filled with “the grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”