T. S. Eliot – Page 8 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

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. In the end, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was published by a different Monro(e), Harriet Monroe, in the June 1915 issue of the magazine Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. (Poetry is still going, and is currently edited by the wonderful Don Share.)

A Biography of 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).

The Advent Calendar of Literature: Day 3

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

The Advent Calendar of Literature: Day 2

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

10 T. S. Eliot Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

T. S. Eliot is widely regarded as one of the most important poets of the last hundred years. Here at Interesting Literature we’re devoted fans of his work, and this got us thinking: which ten defining poems would we recommend to people who want to read him?

Although he didn’t write a huge amount of poetry (compared with, say, his contemporary Ezra Pound, whose The Cantos is nearly 800 pages), it can still be difficult for readers to pick out those works which most define him. And, of course, every Eliot fan’s choice of ten is likely to different.