Project MUSE®: The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2017) through current issueLatest Articles: The T. S. Eliot Studies AnnualTWOProject MUSE®The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual2771-16252689-4181Latest articles in The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Abbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962935
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallAbbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot2025-06-18text/htmlen-USAbbreviations of Works by T. S. Eliot2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®50532026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Eliot's Double World and the Way of Suffering and Contemplation to Burnt Norton
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962936
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Burnt Norton was written as a single poem off and on in 1935 and into the first two months of 1936. It eventually became the first poem in Four Quartets, but in my opinion it remains the central poem in the series that it inspired. A number of Eliot's early poems, plays, and prose writings come into it and are enriched by it (I see it as a fascinating development from Ash-Wednesday). And numerous of his subsequent poems, plays, and prose writings came out of it. The extraordinary background of the poem was in effect waiting for its dramatic occasion and composition. For all the critical studies of Burnt Norton over decades, the poem still resists attempts to identify the sources of some allusions to shared personal
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallEliot's Double World and the Way of Suffering and Contemplation to Burnt Norton2025-06-18text/htmlen-USEliot's Double World and the Way of Suffering and Contemplation to Burnt Norton2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®1131242026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18"The eternal design may appear": T. S. Eliot and the Problem of Periodization
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962937
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Is it possible that there may be a sort of experience-time, or the time pattern in which realities reach us, quite different from the hour after hour, day after day kind? All books still seem bound to this much order, but I have a suspicion that it will go next and writers will discover new beauty in breaking up this most ancient of patterns and re-arranging it.Despite its underlying significance to a number of disciplines across the humanities, Eric Hayot has suggested that the "period is the untheorized ground of the possibility of literary scholarship."2 For Virginia Jackson, periodization is "a problem yet to admit of a solution."3 Notwithstanding the kinds of theoretical complexity suggested by Hayot and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmall"The eternal design may appear": T. S. Eliot and the Problem of Periodization2025-06-18text/htmlen-US"The eternal design may appear": T. S. Eliot and the Problem of Periodization2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®859292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Feeling Stupid at the Beach
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962938
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A few years ago, while visiting New York to conduct research on Eliot's modernist contemporary Marianne Moore, I took the Metro out to Coney Island—an iconic seaside resort on the south-west edge of Brooklyn. I'd been looking for the aquarium that Moore references in her 1916 poem "Is Your Town Nineveh," following her first solo trip to the city in 1915, only to discover that it had been moved in 1957 out from Battery Park to a spot close to where, as Elizabeth Bishop would later recall, Moore had proved herself to be a "fearless rider" of the terrifying rickety rollercoasters that still adorn the seafront.1 I bought my ticket to the aquarium, where I gazed at glowing moon jellies, marveled at a common cuttlefish
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallFeeling Stupid at the Beach2025-06-18text/htmlen-USFeeling Stupid at the Beach2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®840542026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Ecology and Voice: Non-Human Speech and Songs of the Earth in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962939
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Readers have long agreed that T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem, The Waste Land, is fundamentally concerned with voice. The poem ranges through a radical poly-vocality and poly-positionality of its speakers: we hear tissues and textures of poetry from voices in Ovid, Homer, Shakespeare, Marvell, Dante, Baudelaire, Wagner, and Webster, among others; we are privy to private conversations, arguments, cries, and moments of silence and despair where language itself threatens to fail; we overhear people chatting in vernacular Cockney about abortion and World War One demobilization in a London pub; Ovid's seer, Tiresias, offers sober reflections in the present tense on sexual violence and on the ethics of the poem's actors; and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallEcology and Voice: Non-Human Speech and Songs of the Earth in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land2025-06-18text/htmlen-USEcology and Voice: Non-Human Speech and Songs of the Earth in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®689482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18The Eliot We Need
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962940
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It's pretty well understood now that we are probably at the beginning of a golden age of Eliot scholarship, an age in which the profusion of new primary materials is going to prompt and sustain endless new ways of understanding the poet's life and work. This special forum, though, is arranged around the pursuit of new ways in which Eliot can help us understand ourselves.If it is a golden age for Eliot studies, it is not in many other places. When I devised the initial call for submissions, I had a certain sense of its urgency. The number and magnitude of crises confronting human beings, I reasoned, called for even Eliot scholars (of all people) to scour their own stores of resources for anything that might be of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallThe Eliot We Need2025-06-18text/htmlen-USThe Eliot We Need2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®83292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Eliot's "Polish plains"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962941
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Ezra Pound's preface to Valerie Eliot's 1971 facsimile edition of The Waste Land begins with a boon for the Eliot archive—the story of the discovery of the poem's lost manuscript:
I am thankful that the lost leaves have been unearthed. The occultation of "The Waste Land" manuscript (years of waste time, exasperating to its author) is pure Henry James.1
For all the scholarly significance of the manuscript, Pound is ambivalent in explaining exactly how, when, and by whom the papers were concealed and revealed. Its loss is described through complicated terminology, as an astronomical event ("occultation"), and with its nature reduced to its component parts as "leaves," which are also both complete and partial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallEliot's "Polish plains"2025-06-18text/htmlen-USEliot's "Polish plains"2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®654092026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18T. S. Eliot and Populism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962942
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What Eliot had to say of democracy in the late 1920s seems unnervingly elitist: "A real democracy," he says, "is always a restricted democracy, and can only flourish with some limitation by hereditary rights and responsibilities."1 Nowadays, this declaration affronts our democratic sensibilities with its anxiety about increased suffrage and its stress on "hereditary rights," with the latter notion antiquated already at the time Eliot used it. But this claim also appears in the context of his concern about the transparency of democratic institutions; as Eliot notes, "from the moment when the suffrage is conceived as a right instead of as a privilege and a duty and a responsibility, we are on the way merely to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallT. S. Eliot and Populism2025-06-18text/htmlen-UST. S. Eliot and Populism2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®526392026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Learning to be Affected: Food Studies and The Waste Land
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962943
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Could the shape of apartments cause the death of dining together? Or did we reshape our living spaces to accommodate our solitude? With an epidemic of loneliness both predating and following a viral pandemic, a 2024 Atlantic article explains the architectural disappearance of dining rooms and posits that eating together is getting harder, even as it becomes more important.1 Whereas twentieth-century floorplans were structured for dining together, present-day "apartments are built for Netflix and chill," says Bobby Fijan, developer and floor-plan expert.2 In 2012, a food-marketing survey revealed that Americans eat nearly 50 percent of their meals alone.3 Fijan admits that this is a chicken-and-egg problem: "Do we
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallLearning to be Affected: Food Studies and The Waste Land2025-06-18text/htmlen-USLearning to be Affected: Food Studies and The Waste Land2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®698832026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18The Radical Potential of Eliot's Unstable Rape Metaphors: A Re-Reading of the Typist's Assault
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962944
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Sexual violence has a long history of being used as a metaphor, but this metaphorical positioning is rejected by current rape theory and activism for downplaying the experiences of victims and flattening the specific dynamics of rape. For example, Joanna Bourke begins Rape: A History From 1860 to the Present (2007) by arguing that "rape is not a metaphor for the ruin of a city or nation […] It is not an environmental disaster […] It is the embodied violation of another person."1 Similarly, Chloe Angyal responded to a group of young men at the University of Sydney in 2010—who defended their "'pro-rape' Facebook group" by claiming that "they had used the word 'rape' metaphorically" to describe a football victory—that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallThe Radical Potential of Eliot's Unstable Rape Metaphors: A Re-Reading of the Typist's Assault2025-06-18text/htmlen-USThe Radical Potential of Eliot's Unstable Rape Metaphors: A Re-Reading of the Typist's Assault2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®832742026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Cornel West's Revaluation of T. S. Eliot
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962945
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It is part of the business of the critic to preserve tradition—where a good tradition exists.Everybody has a tradition. The question is, which one is it?Over a hundred years after its publication in 1919, one still cannot speak of "tradition" without conjuring the ghost of T. S. Eliot and his inescapable essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Eliot famously writes that the most powerful, enduring, and successful elements of a poet's work are "those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."3 But it is not simply a matter of channeling one's predecessors; rather, it involves what he calls "the historical sense": a grasping of the whole body of one's literary tradition
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallCornel West's Revaluation of T. S. Eliot2025-06-18text/htmlen-USCornel West's Revaluation of T. S. Eliot2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®791342026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Eliot on the Dole
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962946
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"There will come a point when no job is needed.""Modern methods […] have given us the possibility of ease and security for all."Ninety years apart, Elon Musk and Bertrand Russell agree; both predict the end of work. Musk ascribes work's demise to artificial intelligence,3 Russell to mechanization. John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" wrote
We are being afflicted with a new disease […] namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.4
Keynes slightly tempers Musk and Russell's predictions, though he too looked forward "to the age of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallEliot on the Dole2025-06-18text/htmlen-USEliot on the Dole2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®547972026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18The Cupidons in The Waste Land: Their Origin and its Possible Implications
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962947
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Anyway – it was a fantastic honeymoon, wasn't it? Bags of candlelight?Bags. I set light to the hotel curtains with them. […]So that I don't worry about you whilst I'm away. Something awful could happen. There is the risk that the curtains might burn.1It is a recurring motif of Michael Hastings's Tom and Viv (1984) that Vivienne is not safe with candles, and though we cannot be certain that the motif is not the playwright's, James Miller plausibly suggests that it reflects something that actually happened and derives from Maurice Haigh-Wood's recollections of meeting the Eliots in November 1915.2 If so, it must have been a striking and alarming episode, and one of my suggestions here is that it may have influenced
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallThe Cupidons in The Waste Land: Their Origin and its Possible Implications2025-06-18text/htmlen-USThe Cupidons in The Waste Land: Their Origin and its Possible Implications2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®564962026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18T. S. Eliot's Letters and the Course of Eliot Studies: Reviews of T. S. Eliot's Letters, Volumes 5–8
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962948
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Beginning in the Spring 2013 issue of Time Present, Timothy Materer reviewed the volumes of Eliot's letters as they were published by Faber and Faber. Informed by his knowledge of modernism and experience as the editor of two volumes of Ezra Pound's letters, Materer concisely highlighted the most important events and relationships revealed in these thousand-page editions. The permanent value of his reviews contrasted with their ephemeral presence in the pages of the newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society, still at that time printed and mailed to our members. To preserve this scholarship and make it available to the Annual's international audience, we have collected them for reprint in the Annual. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallT. S. Eliot's Letters and the Course of Eliot Studies: Reviews of T. S. Eliot's Letters, Volumes 5–82025-06-18text/htmlen-UST. S. Eliot's Letters and the Course of Eliot Studies: Reviews of T. S. Eliot's Letters, Volumes 5–82025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®748172026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18An Anticolonial Eliot? A Review of Ria Banerjee's Drafty Houses
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962949
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A post publication correction was made. ‘Forester’ was changed to ‘Forster’.Decades ago, in an essay on The Waste Land, Paul Douglass argued that Eliot's "fragmentary and syncretic" aesthetic reflected his "reactionary beliefs" and registered an implicit "defense of Englishness and empire."1 After "de-encrypting, digging up, and decoding" literary fragments like the archaeologists whose discoveries would fill the British Museum, as per Douglass, Eliot imposed an imperial order on the "wreckage" he uncovered.2 Even as scholars turned to chart modernism's global contours, a counternarrative reinforced Eliot's supposed "little-English xenophobia" and "reactionary insularity."3 More recently, Jahan Ramazani has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallAn Anticolonial Eliot? A Review of Ria Banerjee's Drafty Houses2025-06-18text/htmlen-USAn Anticolonial Eliot? A Review of Ria Banerjee's Drafty Houses2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®149392026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Three Lives: A Review of Sara Fitzgerald's The Silenced Muse and Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner's Mary & Mr. Eliot
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962950
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On the face of it, there's not much that Mary Trevelyan had in common with Emily Hale, other than being in love with—and ultimately, having her heart broken by—T. S. Eliot. Even in that their differences are more salient than their similarities: Eliot reciprocated Hale's feelings; indeed, he wooed Hale until she fell in love with him. On the other hand, it was Trevelyan who broached the possibility of romance with Eliot—twice!—each time receiving an awkward refusal in response.But the women have one more thing in common: the testimony they insisted on leaving behind. Two books, Sara Fitzgerald's The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime and Erica Wagner's Mary and Mr. Eliot: A Sort of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallThree Lives: A Review of Sara Fitzgerald's The Silenced Muse and Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner's Mary & Mr. Eliot2025-06-18text/htmlen-USThree Lives: A Review of Sara Fitzgerald's The Silenced Muse and Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner's Mary & Mr. Eliot2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®253292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18"Renewed, Transfigured": Review of Eliot Now, edited by Megan Quigley and David E. Chinitz
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962951
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The editors of this revelatory gathering, Megan Quigley and David E. Chinitz, are each responsible, in their work before Eliot Now, for presenting us with new Eliots. Chinitz, in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, showed us how profoundly engaged Eliot was with popular culture and taught us the importance of coming to terms with the depth and complexity of those engagements.1 Quigley, first at an Eliot conference in 2018 and then, on the Modernism/modernity Print+ platform in 2019, assembled a group of seven other scholars and demonstrated what it meant to be "Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation."2 These were both interventions that changed the discussions of Eliot that followed, and also revealed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmall"Renewed, Transfigured": Review of Eliot Now, edited by Megan Quigley and David E. Chinitz2025-06-18text/htmlen-US"Renewed, Transfigured": Review of Eliot Now, edited by Megan Quigley and David E. Chinitz2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®502312026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Indic Traditions and T. S. Eliot: A Review of Edward Upton's Desire and the Ascetic Ideal: Buddhism and Hinduism in the Works of T. S. Eliot
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962952
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Eliot studies is overdue for a new and comprehensive study of Eliot's engagement with Hindu and Buddhist texts and ideas. Edward Upton's wonderful new book, part of the University of Virginia Press's "Studies in Religion and Culture" series, gives us just that. The book will quickly become, no doubt, a standard guide for navigating Eliot's Indian sources and their religious and philosophical contexts.Cleo McNelly Kearns's excellent T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions (1987) is the hallmark predecessor in this genre of Eliot studies. Upton gives Kearns her proper due from the start, while also expanding upon and engaging with her source work and arguments in light of the almost forty years that have passed since her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallIndic Traditions and T. S. Eliot: A Review of Edward Upton's Desire and the Ascetic Ideal: Buddhism and Hinduism in the Works of T. S. Eliot2025-06-18text/htmlen-USIndic Traditions and T. S. Eliot: A Review of Edward Upton's Desire and the Ascetic Ideal: Buddhism and Hinduism in the Works of T. S. Eliot2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®191662026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18Notes on Contributors and Editors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962954
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Juliette Bretan is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD explores representations of Polish and East-Central European geopolitics in Anglophone and Polish modernism. Her research has been published in Critical Quarterly, The Cambridge Quarterly, and The Conradian, and is forthcoming in Comparative Literature. She has also written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Public Domain Review, The Modernist Review, Engelsberg Ideas, and The Arts Desk, among others.Anna Budziak is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where she teaches courses in literature and literary theory. She specializes in British decadent aestheticism and modernism, focusing on the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/855/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors and Editors2025-06-18text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors and Editors2025-06-182025TWOProject MUSE®142202026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-18