By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ is a 1917 essay by T. S. Eliot. Perhaps surprisingly, the essay begins with Eliot claiming that vers libre doesn’t exist, for reasons that Eliot goes on to outline in the course of the essay. You can read some of […]
Tag: TS Eliot
A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Function of Criticism’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Function of Criticism’ is an influential 1923 essay by T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most important poet-critic of the modernist movement. In some ways a follow-up to Eliot’s earlier essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ from four years earlier, ‘The Function of Criticism’ […]
A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ is the title usually given to T. S. Eliot’s review of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Eliot’s short review was published in The Dial magazine in 1923, and can be read here; below, we offer a few words of analysis of this […]
The Meaning and Origin of ‘This is the Way the World Ends: Not with a Bang but a Whimper’
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s ‘this is the way the world ends’ ‘This is the way the world ends’, T. S. Eliot tells us at the end of his 1925 poem, ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘not with a […]
10 of the Most Famous Lines by T. S. Eliot
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Anglo-American modernist poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was arguably the most influential poet of the twentieth century. With poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’, and Four Quartets, Eliot changed the landscape of poetry forever.