By Dr Oliver Tearle
‘A literary movement’, the Irish novelist George Moore once observed, ‘consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.’ Few literary movements better exemplify Moore’s point than modernism. Modernism was a hugely significant movement in art, literature, architecture, and music in the early twentieth century.
A short introduction to the landmark poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T. S. Eliot
1. One poetry bookseller rejected the poem on the grounds that it was ‘absolutely insane’. Harold Monro, influential publisher and owner of the Poetry Bookshop in London, was offered the chance to publish ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It’s a curious fact that he could have been the first person to get T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking modernist poem into print, but he wasn’t interested. He flung it back, labelling it ‘insane’, as Peter Ackroyd records in his lucid and informative biography T.S.Eliot
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
We could write thousands of words as part of a T. S. Eliot biography, but instead we’ll limit ourselves to a reasonably short piece that distils all of the most interesting aspects of Eliot’s life into one relatively brief post. What follows, then, is a very short guide to the amazing life of T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).
Over the last couple of days, we’ve looked at the connections between literature and the Christmas card. The seasonal greetings card isn’t a genre that is renowned for its great literature, but there is at least one poet who contributed something truly poetic to the form. Today’s pick of our Christmas literary facts concerns this … Read more
As we saw in yesterday’s Christmas literature post, the first commercially available Christmas cards were sent in 1843, the same year as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was published. In that post we also revealed the humorous origins of the robin redbreast on the front of Christmas cards. Now, presumably quite soon after Christmas cards appeared … Read more