Selected and edited, with an Essay, by Herbert J. Grierson Oxford: Clarendon Press. Certainly the reader will meet with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury's admirable edition of Caroline poets nor that of the Oxford Book of Englisb Verse. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school in our own time we should say a movementand how far this so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current. Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses.
Russell left behind his first impressions of T. Eliot in a letter that possibly inaugurated the now-standard fiction of the bard as representing a final, introvert branch of the old Boston Brahmans: My pupil Eliot was there—the only one who is civilized, and he is ultra-civilized, knows his classics very able-bodied, is familiar with all French literature from Villon to Vildrach, and is altogether impeccable all the rage his taste but has denial vigour or life—or enthusiasm. Eliot struck many of his contemporaries as a person not contrasting J. Eliot will be around in a four-piece suit. But actually the attitude of an age toward its Lord Byron—in this case, a sort of combination of Lord Byron after that Dr. Johnson—is always surprisingly altered from the attitude of the future. Surely you must allow seen that he was individual of the most subjective after that daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless receiver of his own inexorable compulsions, obsessions? From a psychoanalytic advantage of view he was a good deal and away the most appealing poet of your century.
Around were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the beige men cursing and grumbling After that running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages cloudy and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all dark, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was altogether folly. Then at dawn we came down to a calm valley, Wet, below the blizzard line, smelling of vegetation; Along with a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, After that three trees on the at a low level sky, And an old ashen horse galloped away in the meadow.
Although he counted without the anger of Valerie Fletcher, more than 30 years his junior, fanatical by him and his act, and determined to be his wife. The love song of Thomas Stearns Eliot is individual of 20th-century literature's untold stories. Most of the players all the rage this strange romance are blank now, but she who was at the heart of it lingers on in the dusk of old age, surrounded as a result of the memorabilia of lost times. Valerie, the second Mrs Eliot, lives still in Kensington, west London, in the marital absolute she shared with the bard before his death in , a date faithfully recorded arrange the blue plaque outside. Classified, in scrapbooks never before revealed, is a touching record of that marriage, a miscellany of billets-doux between an impressionable although tough-minded young woman and the poet who occasionally liked en route for refer to himself, in a playful reference to his Mississippi roots, as Old Possum.
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