'Coachman's daughter Anne Tibble was enraged by "The Waste Land", which she read as a scholarship student at a redbrick university: "Eliot's neurosis of disillusion was horrifying... almost utterly invalid...almost entirely without feeling for others. Eliot showed people as ugly, stupid, shabby, vulgarian, squalid, somehow indecent...the 'broken fingernails of dirty hands'...Weren't these my father's and my mother's hands?". The experience of reading it plunged her into depression, but in the late 1920s it was difficult to express her real feelings about one of the greatest living poets...Instead, she channelled her scholarly energies toward the poetry of John Clare, whose work affirmed the literacy of working people'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Anne Tibble Print: Unknown
'With autodidact diligence [Leslie Paul] closed in on the avant-garde. He read "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land", though not until the 1930s. He smuggled "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" past customs. In "John O'London's" and "The Nation", in William MacDougall's Home University Library volume on "Psychology" and F.A. Servante's "Psychology of the Boy", he read up on Freud. In a few years he knew enough to ghost-write BBC lectures on modern psychology'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Paul Print: Book
'With autodidact diligence [Leslie Paul] closed in on the avant-garde. He read "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land", though not until the 1930s. He smuggled "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" past customs. In "John O'London's" and "The Nation", in William MacDougall's Home University Library volume on "Psychology" and F.A. Servante's "Psychology of the Boy", he read up on Freud. In a few years he knew enough to ghost-write BBC lectures on modern psychology'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Paul Print: Book
'Bernard Kops, the son of an immigrant leather worker, had a special understanding of the transition from from autodidact culture to Bohemia to youth culture, because he experienced all three. He grew up in the ferment of the Jewish East End... read "The Tempest" at school, and cried over "The Forsaken Merman". At fifteen he became a cook at a hotel, where the staff gave him Karl Marx, Henry Miller and "Ten Days that Shook the World". A neighbor presented him with the poems of Rupert Brooke, and "Grantchester" so resonated with the Jewish slum boy that he went to the library to find another volume from the same publisher, Faber and Faber. Thus he stumbled upon T.S. Eliot. "This book changed my life", he remembered. "It struck me straight in the eye like a bolt of lightning... I had no preconceived ideas about poetry and read 'The Waste Land' and 'Prufrock' as if they were the most acceptable and common forms in existence. The poems spoke to me directly, for they were bound up with the wasteland of the East End, and the desolation and lonelines of people and landscape. Accidentally I had entered the mainstream of literature".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Bernard Kops Print: Book
'Bernard Kops, the son of an immigrant leather worker, had a special understanding of the transition from from autodidact culture to Bohemia to youth culture, because he experienced all three. He grew up in the ferment of the Jewish East End... read "The Tempest" at school, and cried over "The Forsaken Merman". At fifteen he became a cook at a hotel, where the staff gave him Karl Marx, Henry Miller and "Ten Days that Shook the World". A neighbor presented him with the poems of Rupert Brooke, and "Grantchester" so resonated with the Jewish slum boy that he went to the library to find another volume from the same publisher, Faber and Faber. Thus he stumbled upon T.S. Eliot. "This book changed my life", he remembered. "It struck me straight in the eye like a bolt of lightning... I had no preconceived ideas about poetry and read 'The Waste Land' and 'Prufrock' as if they were the most acceptable and common forms in existence. The poems spoke to me directly, for they were bound up with the wasteland of the East End, and the desolation and lonelines of people and landscape. Accidentally I had entered the mainstream of literature".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Bernard Kops Print: Book
'her main intellectual interests were always literary, and as a novelist she was predominantly engaged in the business of reading and writing, with a keen critical interest in the works of other writers. She read avidly, modern poets such as T.S. Eliot, Roy Fuller, Auden and Cecil Day Lewis, and contemporary novelists, admiring in particular the work of Faulkner and Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton Burnett, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen. Jean Rhys's bleak, beautiful novel "Voyage in the Dark", published in the same month as [Lehmann's] "Invitation to the Waltz", had much impressed Rosamond, who invited its author to tea'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rosamond Lehmann Print: Book
[Rosamond Lehmann wrote in her memoir, "Swan at Evening"] "I took down and re-read "The Four Quartets", the sublime, unhopeful, consoling cluster of poems; and discovered, or rather re-discovered, that everything was there - everything that I have been trying, and shall be trying, to say".
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rosamond Lehmann Print: Book
'The fresh-sounding work of the war generation, which began to appear in the late 1920s and early 1930s, provided him with important models. Huxley, Wells and Aldington (especially "Death of a Hero") were rapidly digested; his poetic models were Edith Sitwell, Aldington, Nichols, Sassoon and Graves (in the cheap Benn's Sixpenny Poets editions), to be followed by the more lasting influences of Eliot and D.H. Lawrence...He read an essay by Lawrence in which he showed how England treated its writers. That, he said, made him decide "to swim against the current".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell Print: Book
Friday 23 June 1922: 'Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure. But he read till he had to rush -- letters to write about the London Magazine -- & discussion thus was curtailed. One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land, it is called'.
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Stearns Eliot
'Sydney shaped Larkin's taste skilfully, leading him away from J.C. Powys and towards Llewelyn and T.F., towards James Joyce with no expectation that he would enjoy him, and towards poets who would remain favourites all his life: Hardy, Christina Rossetti and A.E. Housman. In late 1939, when Larkin discovered T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood, Sydney also encouraged him - continuing, as he had always done, to make reading seem an independent activity, only tenuously linked to schoolwork.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin Print: Book
'I have been thinking about Eliot and Jew hatred - a compassionate man one would say, cultured, civilised? and yet he can write poison like this:
"The rats are underneath the piles.
The Jew is underneath the lot." ' [quotation from Glasser's friend Bill Werner]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Bill Werner Print: Book
'Meeting held at School House, Leighton Park. Jan 27th 1942
J. Knox Taylor in the Chair.
[...]
5. The subject was a provocative one “Modern Poetry” & we very gladly welcomed
Kenneth Nicholson into our midst, as he had kindly consented to come & talk to us
about modern poetry & to lead us into the strange regions of this somewhat
unknown world.
6. Gerard Manley Hopkins & W. B. Yeats were apparently the leaders in breaking
away from the old traditions of poetry-making, & of setting up a new form, even
expressing a new spirit. We then listened to poems of T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen &
W. Auden, & saw how this new way progressed & was elaborated.
We were bewildered, astounded & intrigued by turns! Through the intracacies [sic]
of “sprung rhythm”, down the “arterial roads” of poetical imagery of the early
1920’s to the more apparently intelligible sombreness of recent poetry, we were
led gently but inexorably, by our persuasive speaker, to see & realise that
however strangely we might regard this literature of our age, we must
acknowledge the urgency & sincerity of what the modern poet had to say.
7. Isabel Taylor, Roger Moore, Margaret Dilks, A. G. Joselin, and F. E. Pollard all
contributed readings, some from the poets already mentioned, others from the
poetry of Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, McNeice & Dylan Thomas. Some pleased,
others perplexed; we capitulated before such a phrase as “As a madman shakes a
dead geranium”, but again were revived with what appeared to us as more lucid
poems. One which pleased us with its clarity, evoked the remark from F. E.
Pollard “that the only thing wrong with it was what was the
matter with that except that it was immediately intelligible”!
Such was our introduction to “Modern Poetry,” whether or not we appreciated its
“difference,” we were deeply grateful to K. Nicholson for inspiring us with the
desire to read more.
[signed as a true record by] Arnold G. Joselin
23/2/42. [at the club meeting held at 72 Shinfield Road: see XII Book Club Minute
Book, p. 113]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: [a member of the XII Book Club – one of Isabel Taylor, Roger Moore, Margaret Dilks, A. G. Joselin, or F. E. Pollard] Print: Book
