TS Eliot – Page 4 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Hysteria’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) published his first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. This slim volume included poems written in a wide variety of styles and modes, from vers libre to Shakespearean blank verse, from dramatic monologues to short lyrics. The volume also included one prose poem, ‘Hysteria’, which T. S. Eliot had written in November 1915. Below we offer some notes towards an analysis of ‘Hysteria’, which you can read here.

A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Preludes’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Preludes’ is a series of four short poems written by T. S. Eliot early in his career and published in his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. In the following post we intend to sketch out a brief summary and analysis of ‘Preludes’, exploring the meaning of these short masterpieces and their significance for Eliot’s later poetry.

A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hippopotamus’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Hippopotamus’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s quatrain poems, written just after the First World War and published in his 1919 volume, Poems. By turns comical and serious, sincere and playful, high satirical and almost nonsense-like, ‘The Hippopotamus’ shows a very different T. S. Eliot from the one we glimpse in The Waste Land. It is even more interesting as a satire against the Church in light of Eliot’s later conversion to the Church of England, in 1927. You can read ‘The Hippopotamus’ here; below is our analysis.

The ‘quatrain’ poems which make up all but one of the English poems in Poems (the volume also contains a few poems written in French) were inspired by the French example of Théophile Gautier (1811-72), whose volume Émaux et Camées Eliot had been encouraged to read by Ezra Pound. The hard, sculptured feel to these quatrain poems was the result of Pound’s influence: this precise and controlled kind of poetic form was something which Pound thought Eliot could work with to good effect.

A Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Morning at the Window’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Morning at the Window’ was written by T. S. Eliot in autumn 1914 and published in Eliot’s first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, three years later. You can read ‘Morning at the Window’ here; below is our analysis of the poem.

10 Great Quotes from T. S. Eliot on His Birthday

T. S. Eliot could be as witty as Wilde and as thought-provoking as Einstein with his one-liners, and so here are some choice quotes from this leading twentieth-century poet and all-round literary giant. Eliot’s life was a fascinating one: he was born on 26 September 1888 in Missouri, studied at Harvard, then transferred to Oxford, … Read more