The Sacred Wood (T. S. Eliot)

Last updated

The Sacred Wood is a collection of 20 essays by T. S. Eliot, first published in 1920. Topics include Eliot's opinions of many literary works and authors, including Shakespeare's play Hamlet , and the poets Dante and Blake. [1]

T. S. Eliot English author

Thomas Stearns Eliot,, "one of the twentieth century's major poets" was also an essayist, publisher, playwright, and literary and social critic. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American passport.

<i>Hamlet</i> tragedy by William Shakespeare

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare at an uncertain date between 1599 and 1602. Set in Denmark, the play dramatises the revenge Prince Hamlet is called to wreak upon his uncle, Claudius, by the ghost of Hamlet's father, King Hamlet. Claudius had murdered his own brother and seized the throne, also marrying his deceased brother's widow.

Dante Alighieri Italian poet

Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, commonly known by his name of art Dante Alighieri or simply as Dante, was an Italian poet during the Late Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered the most important poem of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

One of his most important prose works, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" which was originally published in two parts in The Egoist , is a part of The Sacred Wood.

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, "The Sacred Wood" (1920). The essay is also available in Eliot's "Selected Prose" and "Selected Essays".

<i>The Egoist</i> (periodical)

The Egoist was a London literary magazine published from 1914 to 1919, during which time it published important early modernist poetry and fiction. In its manifesto, it claimed to "recognise no taboos", and published a number of controversial works, such as parts of Ulysses. Today, it is considered "England's most important Modernist periodical."

The essay "Philip Massinger" contains the famous line (often misquoted) "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal". [2]

Related Research Articles

David Jones (artist-poet) painter and British modernist poet

Walter David Jones CH, CBE was both a painter and one of the first-generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolour, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was considered by T. S. Eliot to be of major importance, and his work The Anathemata was considered by W. H. Auden to be the best long poem written in English in the 20th century. Help in forming his work came from his Christian beliefs and Welsh heritage.

Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the United Kingdom. Faber has published some of the most well-known literature in the English language, including William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Poet T. S. Eliot was once a Faber editor.

In literary criticism, an objective correlative is a group of things or events which systematically represent emotions.

Kathleen Jamie British poet

Professor Kathleen Jamie FRSL is an award winning Scottish poet and essayist, and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Stirling.

Ross Nichols Neo-druid

Philip Peter Ross Nichols was a Cambridge academic and published poet, artist and historian, who founded the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids in 1964. He wrote prolifically on the subjects of Druidism and Celtic mythology.

Poetic tradition is a concept similar to that of the poetic or literary canon. The concept of poetic tradition has been commonly used as a part of historical literary criticism, in which a poet or author is evaluated in the context of his historical period, his immediate literary influences or predecessors, and his literary contemporaries. T. S. Eliot claimed in Tradition and the Individual Talent, published in 1919, that for a poet to fully come into his own, he must be aware of his predecessors, and view the work of his predecessors as living, not dead. The poetic tradition is a line of descent of poets who have achieved a sublime state and can surrender themselves to their work to create a poem that both builds on existing tradition and stands on its own.

Hamlet and His Problems is an essay written by T.S. Eliot in 1919 that offers a critical reading of Hamlet. The essay first appeared in Eliot's The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism in 1920. It was later reprinted by Faber & Faber in 1932 in Selected Essays, 1917-1932. Eliot's critique gained attention partly due to his claim that Hamlet is "most certainly an artistic failure." Eliot also popularised the concept of the objective correlative—a mechanism used to evoke emotion in an audience—in the essay. The essay is also an example of Eliot's use of what became known as new criticism.

"The Frontiers of Criticism" is a lecture given by T. S. Eliot at the University of Minnesota in 1956. It was reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, a collection of Eliot's critical essays, in 1957. The essay is an attempt by Eliot to define the boundaries of literary criticism: to say what does, and what does not, constitute truly literary criticism, as opposed to, for example, a study in history based upon a work of literature. The essay is significant because it represents Eliot's response to the New Critical perspective which had taken the academic study of literature by storm during Eliot's lifetime. It also presents an analysis of some of its author's own poetic works, an unusual characteristic for modern criticism—it has become far more usual today for poets and critics to be in separate camps, rather than united in one individual. Perhaps even more importantly, it demonstrates the progress and change in Eliot's own critical thought over the years between 1919 and 1956.

<i>The Waste Land</i> poem by T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih".

Alberto Blanco (poet) Mexican poet

Alberto Blanco is considered one of Mexico's most important poets. Born in Mexico City on February 18, 1951, he spent his childhood and adolescence in that city, and he studied chemistry at the Universidad Iberoamericana and philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. For two years, he pursued a master's degree in Asian Studies, specializing in China, at El Colegio de México.1 Blanco was first published in a journal in 1970. He was co-editor and designer of the poetry journal El Zaguan (1975–1977), and a grant recipient of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, and the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. In 1991 he received a grant from the Fulbright Program as a poet-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine; and, in 1992, he was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He was admitted into the Sistema Nacional de Creadores in 1994, for which he has also been a juror. In 2001 he received the Octavio Paz Grant for Poetry, and in 2008, he was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. He remains a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores.

The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. The Criterion was, for most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927–28 it was published monthly. It was created by the poet, dramatist, and literary critic T. S. Eliot who served as its editor for its entire run.

Poetry Ireland is an organisation for poets and poetry, in both Irish and English, in the island of Ireland. It is a private nonprofit organisation that receives support from The Arts Council of Ireland and The Arts Council of Northern Ireland. It was founded in 1978 by John F. Deane and is based in Parnell Square, Dublin. Its thirtieth anniversary in 2008 was celebrated by events all over Ireland culminating in an event at the Irish College in Paris.

Classic book

A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, for example through an imprimatur such as being listed in a list of great books, or through a reader's personal opinion. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.

Deryn Rees-Jones is an Anglo Welsh poet, who lives and works in Liverpool. Although, Rees-Jones has spent much of her life in Liverpool, she spent much of her childhood in the family home of Eglwys-bach in North Wales and she thinks of herself as a Welsh writer.

Paul Brendan Murray,, .(born 26 November 1947), is an Irish Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, poet, writer, and professor. Murray was born at Newcastle, County Down, in Northern Ireland. In 1966 he joined the Irish Dominican Province, and was ordained a priest in 1973. Since 1994 he has lived in Rome, Italy, where he teaches the literature of the mystical tradition at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, also known as the Angelicum.

T. S. Eliot bibliography

The T. S. Eliot bibliography contains a list of works by T. S. Eliot.

Kārlis Vērdiņš is a Latvian poet.

Algernon Charles Swinburne English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of poetry such as Poems and Ballads, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

References

  1. The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays - Google Book Search . Retrieved 2008-10-15.
  2. "T. S. Eliot." Wikiquote, . 29 Oct 2015, 12:22 UTC. 21 Nov 2015, 22:51 <https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=T._S._Eliot&oldid=2030414>

The Sacred Wood <https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=The_Sacred_Wood>