Previous Summer Schools

What enabled Eliot to “modernize himself on his own,” as Ezra Pound memorably remarked? This seminar explores his early life, cultural influences, and literary experiments leading to Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems (1920), and The Sacred Wood. As context of these early works we may consider the impact of his St. Louis childhood, his relationships with Emily Hale, Vivien Haigh-Wood, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf, his reading in Romantic and Victorian poetry, his philosophical education, and his career as a literary journalist.

This seminar will be devoted to The Waste Land and how it can be understood through its contexts. Essentially, we will explore what the poem meant at the time, and how that initial context shapes our understanding today. Each day we will discuss the poem in relation to a different contextual frame: to Eliot’s essays (“Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” “Marie Lloyd,” “The Metaphysical Poets” “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), to contemporary ideas of lyric poetry and the canon at the time, to Hope Mirrlees’ experimental 1919 Paris: A Poem, to its initial reviews, and to its status/function as a prize poem.

Four Quartets represents a pivot point in Eliot’s career. This set of poems, especially the final one, “Little Gidding,” has been called Eliot’s farewell to poetry; after the completion of “Little Gidding,” he never wrote another major poem. But Four Quartets is also a beginning, pointing the way toward the dramatic and critical work that would occupy the final two decades of Eliot’s life. In Four Quartets and his late prose, Eliot reflected on the world that came to an end with the second world war and on the cultural, spiritual, and literary frameworks that could usher in a new one. In this seminar, we will look at the contexts out of which Four Quartets arose; discuss the poems’ inspiration, composition, and reception; and consider major essays like “The Idea of a Christian Society” and “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.”

In this seminar, we will explore the transnational range, dynamics, and subsequent influences of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Although Eliot has often been considered either canonically English or quintessentially American, we will examine his poetry’s overflowing of national borders, its global horizons and reach. We will investigate how, why, and to what extent his poems traverse a variety of literary and cultural traditions, as well as multiple geographies, languages, and religions. We will ask about the meaning and significance of his engagement with Asian cultural materials in The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and elsewhere. We will consider the interrelations between the local and the foreign or even planetary in his work, including its implications for global ecopoetics and climate change poetry today. We will also reconsider Eliot through the lens of poets he influenced with roots in the global South, such as Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Agha Shahid Ali, and Daljit Nagra.

In this seminar we’re going to think through Eliot’s portrayals of women in his poetry from a feminist perspective and in light of new revelations into Eliot’s biography from the Emily Hale Papers and Ann Pasternak Slater’s recent biography of Vivien Eliot. We will examine his major female ‘characters’ in “Portrait of a Lady,” “Hysteria,” “La Figlia Che Piange,” The Waste Land, and “Burnt Norton.” We will take Eliot’s hint that many of these figures are connected through Hale and put pressure on their similarities and differences. We will also think about Eliot’s biography, the editions of his work, the fanfic and films of Eliot and the women of his life, to consider how scholarship has addressed Eliot’s relationship to historical women and the ways that the new letters force us to reconsider Eliotic impersonality. 

As both poet and critic Eliot was profoundly aware of the incantatory power of the human voice, of rhythm as a form of encounter, and of the deep relations between speech, memory, and the body. This seminar draws on Geoffrey Hartman’s insight that “myth and metaphor are endued with the acts, the gesta, of speech; and if there is a mediator for our experiences of literature, it is something as simply with us as the human body, namely the human voice.” How might we, as readers, enter into a dialogue with those elements of Eliot’s poetics that speak back to and through a variety of utterances and echoes? Drawing on a variety of poetry and criticism from across Eliot’s oeuvre, we will attempt to trace the ways in which Eliot’s own moments of readerly attentiveness find their way into his poetry, as moments of peculiar energy, furtive allusion, and ethical commitment. This seminar is an opportunity to explore Eliot’s writing through the practise of close reading that gives due attention to the formative as well as formal aspects of both his poetry and criticism.

A poetry workshop available by special enrolment. Students will be asked to submit up to four original poems, as well as some lines written in close imitation of an Eliot poem from any period (which should be attached for class discussion). This may be a 'serious' reappropriation of a recognisably Eliotic topic or bit of syntax for your own purposes, or something closer to pastiche or parody. For inspiration, you might listen to Dylan Thomas reading Henry Reed's 'Chard Whitlow', a parody that Eliot apparently enjoyed: http://www.solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/audio/dylanthomaschardwhitlow.mp3.

What enabled Eliot to “modernize himself on his own,” as Ezra Pound memorably remarked? This seminar explores some literary and cultural influences on Eliot’s early writing that contributed to his poetic development. We will read from Inventions of the March Hare, Prufrock and Other Observations, and his early literary criticism, with reference to selected poems, stories, songs, paintings, philosophy, and other sources that may have influenced his writing. Broadening out, we will also explore historical factors that contributed to Eliot’s rapid and unique self-modernization, such as his childhood in St. Louis.

This seminar will be devoted to The Waste Land and how it can be understood through its contexts. Essentially, we will explore what the poem meant at the time, and how that initial context shapes our understanding today. Each day we will discuss the poem in relation to a different contextual frame: to Eliot’s essays (“Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” “Marie Lloyd,” “The Metaphysical Poets” “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), to contemporary ideas of lyric poetry and the canon at the time, to Hope Mirrlees’ experimental 1919 Paris: A Poem, to its initial reviews, and to its status/function as a prize poem.

Four Quartets represents a pivot point in Eliot’s career. This set of poems, especially the final one, “Little Gidding,” has been called Eliot’s farewell to poetry; after the completion of “Little Gidding,” he never wrote another major poem. But Four Quartets is also a beginning, pointing the way toward the dramatic and critical work that would occupy the final two decades of Eliot’s life. In Four Quartets and his late prose, Eliot reflected on the world that came to an end with the second world war and on the cultural, spiritual, and literary frameworks that could usher in a new one. In this seminar, we will look at the contexts out of which Four Quartets arose; discuss the poems’ inspiration, composition, and reception; and consider major essays like “The Idea of a Christian Society” and “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.”

In this seminar, we will explore the transnational range, dynamics, and subsequent influences of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Although Eliot has often been considered either canonically English or quintessentially American, we will examine his poetry’s overflowing of national borders, its global horizons and reach. We will investigate how, why, and to what extent his poems traverse a variety of literary and cultural traditions, as well as multiple geographies, languages, and religions. We will ask about the meaning and significance of his engagement with Asian cultural materials in The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and elsewhere. We will consider the interrelations between the local and the foreign or even planetary in his work. We will also reconsider Eliot through the lens of poets he influenced in the global South, such as South Asian, Caribbean, and black British poets including Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Agha Shahid Ali, and Daljit Nagra.

From the “Curtain Raiser” of his first notebook of poems through Four Quartets and on to his last play, Eliot engaged with nearly all the performance and visual arts, quoting songs and borrowing musical forms, referring to paintings, sculpture, dances and dancers, and mixing drama with poetry, to name but a few of his ways of conversing with other arts. His poetry often unfolds in the theater, in the museum, and in the cabaret, dance, and music halls of St. Louis, Boston, Paris, and London. What cultural attitudes or aesthetic sensibilities does Eliot’s many-sided engagement with the arts register in his poetry? How does an attentiveness to these other art forms enrich our reading of Eliot’s poetry? What makes poetry distinct from other art forms? To answer these questions we will read Eliot’s poetry in relation to paintings, songs, sculpture, and architecture.

As both poet and critic Eliot was profoundly aware of the incantatory power of the human voice, of rhythm as a form of encounter, and of the deep relations between speech, memory, and the body. This seminar draws on Geoffrey Hartman’s insight that “myth and metaphor are endued with the acts, the gesta, of speech; and if there is a mediator for our experiences of literature, it is something as simply with us as the human body, namely the human voice.” How might we, as readers, enter into a dialogue with those elements of Eliot’s poetics that speak back to and through a variety of utterances and echoes? Drawing on a variety of poetry and criticism from across Eliot’s oeuvre, we will attempt to trace the ways in which Eliot’s own moments of readerly attentiveness find their way into his poetry, as moments of peculiar energy, furtive allusion, and ethical commitment. This seminar is an opportunity to explore Eliot’s writing through the practise of close reading that gives due attention to the formative as well as formal aspects of both his poetry and criticism.

In this seminar, we will start with a few poems of Eliot’s juvenilia and his notebook (published as Inventions of the March Hare), just to see how quickly he develops as an artist, finding his voice and audience. The centerpiece of the course will be Prufrock and Other Observations, especially “Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” We will see how this successful manner first triumphs, then runs out of steam, fizzling out in the Boston satires (“Aunt Helen,” “Cousin Nancy,” etc.). Finally, we’ll explore how Eliot changes course with the French poems (“Dans le restaurant,” “Le Directeur”). Though the course is primarily focused on his poetic development, we’ll look at some early essays written concurrently, such as “Reflections on vers libre,” “The Borderline of Prose,” “In Memory of Henry James,” and his course syllabi from 1917.

We will focus on Eliot’s creative output from 1922 to 1930, beginning with the poem Eliot himself saw as the culmination of all his work up to that point: The Waste Land. From there we’ll turn to the work that Eliot hoped would take his career in another direction—his “jazz play,” Sweeney Agonistes—and to the poem that he wrote when that experiment failed: The Hollow Men. We’ll finish up with Eliot’s first post-conversion poems, Ash-Wednesday and the “Ariel poems,” which express a hard-won and doubt-beset faith. Alongside Eliot’s verse, we’ll read several of the concurrent essays that shed light on the ideas and principles underlying the poetry, including “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” “Marie Lloyd,” “Baudelaire,” and “Dante.”

Eliot’s most famous poem was published in 1922, and his most influential literary criticism appeared in The Sacred Wood (1920). Some critics think, as I do, that his greatest poetic achievement came later in his long career. We will focus our attention on the Four Quartets [1936-1943] and on a selection of his many essays in literary and social criticism published from 1932 to 1965. It is clear that the later poems display a style accurately characterized as discursive and even prosaic. How did the great modernist poet arrive at a form of address so remote from the collagist technology of the Waste Land? What did he then wish for his art and for the literary culture of Europe? These are the general questions we’ll address, but we will proceed from close analysis of lines of Four Quartets.

In this seminar, we will investigate the ecological worlds of The Waste Land and Four Quartets. We will take the term "ecology" broadly in order to explore how Eliot crafts relationships among the organic and the mechanic, the bodily and the environmental, the seasonal and the synthetic, the human and the more-than-human in his verse. Across the span of these two long poems, how does Eliot move from eviscerate to significant soil and why? How does the poetry figure the body's or a community's relationship to environment and what forces disrupt that connection? What are the differing kinds of waste in these pieces and how do they prevent or promote flourishing? To answer these ques tions, we will also consider his poetry in the context of his involvement with early environmental groups, such as the British Soil Association and the National Trust, as well as his engagement with city planning, garden aesthetics, and modern funerary practices, to name but a few provocative points of Eliot's modernist nature-culture contact.

This seminar will aim at exploring Eliot’s immersion in French poetry not just as a way of catching up with the “modernity” of his times when America was lagging behind, but as creating a poetic subjectivity (which is more than a sensibility). Why was the discovery of Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature such a shock for Eliot? How could this sketchy survey produce “a wholly new feeling” in him, and then lead to a “revelation”? Why did the young Eliot feel the need to write like Laforgue or Corbière in order to find his own voice? And why, once he saw the limitations of those models, did he persist in investigating the best French poets, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry, and Saint John Perse? Eliot’s evolution could thus be compared with that of Samuel Beckett: both moved away from poetry to the stage, both were Anglophone writers turning to French in order to write differently. This will lead to parallel readings of Eliot’s plays along those of Beckett.

The hallmark of Eliot’s early poems is the dramatization of painful disjunctions between body and soul, logic and longing, refinement and desire. In this seminar, we will read works that document the formative nature of this conflict and the relation of his attempt to deal with it to his evolving religious imagination. The emphasis will be on the psychological and social disjunctions of 1910-14 and the watershed spiritual crisis of 1925-1927, culminating in conversion. We will look at early poems and an early essay on the religious imagination, “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual.” From the 1920s, we will read prose that shows a re-formulation of the conflict in religious terms as Eliot moved from the despair of The Hollow Men to the pain of “Journey of the Magi” to the joy of “Marina” to the incarnational moments of Burnt Norton. Along the way, we will look at Eliot’s appreciation of Dante, Lancelot Andrewes, and Pascal as thinkers who exemplify a dialectic between intelligence and feeling that is sensitive to whispers of transcendence.