The 34th European Association for American Studies (EAAS) Conference was held at the Madrid campus of the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) during April 6-8, 2022. To mark the centenary of The Waste Land, “Wastelands” became the meeting's overarching theme, encompassing the variou...

The Poetic Drama Movement

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Dídac Llorens (12 mars 2022)

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Twentieth-century verse drama has come to be regarded as a literary project commanded by, indeed limited to T. S. Eliot; because of his aims toward commercial comedy, it may also be perceived as an anachronistic extravagance. Yet, in Eliot's "A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry" (1928), one of the speaker...

Nurses and Comic Relief

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Dídac Llorens (29 janv. 2022)

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A memorable image of negative mysticism in "East Coker" is that of the "dying nurse" whose "constant care" is to "remind" patients that "to be restored, our sickness must grow worse". This reminder may apply to Lord Claverton: Eliot places the protagonist of The Elder Statesman in the position of le...

Ghosts of Christmas Past

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Dídac Llorens (27 déc. 2021)

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The working title of The Waste Land was He Do the Police in Different Voices, a quotation from Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865). The sentence points to key elements of Eliot's poem that we could consider "dramatic": effective characterisation, dialectal features, ventriloquism or dialogic...

Eliot's Verse Drama and "a Novel in Verse"

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Dídac Llorens (12 déc. 2021)

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In "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1953), T. S. Eliot referred to the love poems that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote for each other and then published, in order to prove his point that "the voice of the poet talking to one person only" was "an illusion" (*). The essay focuses on...

Striving Toward the Condition of Drama

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Dídac Llorens (28 nov. 2021)

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In 1959, the year after its first production in Britain, The Elder Statesman, was programmed in a new theatre in Germany, the Staatstheater at Kassel. For the occasion, Eliot wrote a note of greeting (*) in which, very much the "elder statesman" of international letters, he stressed how drama had sh...

Investigations Into the Life of the Spirit

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Dídac Llorens (6 nov. 2021)

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Light comedy in The Confidential Clerk (1953) is provided mostly by a character, Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer. She is presented to Colby by Eggerson as whimsical, absent-minded, and often needing rescue: It's been a very unusual privilege To see as much of Europe as I have, Getting Lady Elizabeth out of...

We Call Him Just Gus

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Dídac Llorens (23 oct. 2021)

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In a famous photograph, T. S. Eliot stands outside the back door of the Cambridge Theatre in London (where the first production of The Elder Statesman was running in 1958), fondly looking down at a passing cat. It would seem to illustrate one of the most memorable poems of his Old Possum's Book of P...

Not a Very Jolly Corner

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Dídac Llorens (9 oct. 2021)

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Etching by Peter Milton for Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" In a review (unsigned) of the first production of The Family Reunion (1939), published in Listener, the anonymous reviewer argues that it "compares with the most sensitive of the short novels by Henry James" [*]. Eliot wrote this play at a...

Drama at the 42nd ITSES Annual Meeting

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Dídac Llorens (3 oct. 2021)

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The 42nd International T. S. Eliot Society Annual Meeting took place last weekend, online for a second year. One of the peer seminars, coordinated by Fabio L. Vericat and myself, was dedicated to "Eliot's Plays, the Stage and the Dramatic Arts". The participants' interests were wide-ranging, and inc...

So Inquisitive

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Dídac Llorens (11 sept. 2021)

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Paul Pry, the comic character created by John Poole and John Liston In Act Three of The Cocktail Party, we learn that Celia Copplestone, whose existential ennui causes her to refuse "the human condition," became a missionary and was crucified by heathen insurgents. Her body, or rather "the traces of...

A Question of Form

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Dídac Llorens (28 août 2021)

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Coreographer Gillian Lynne during rehearsal of Cats Drama, and poetic drama specifically, features prominently in T. S. Eliot's criticism, from the 1920s onwards. Two essays, one from the beginning of the decade, "The Possibility of Poetic Drama" (1920), and the other from the late twenties, "A Dial...

Offstage Purgatories

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Dídac Llorens (15 août 2021)

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Spatial settings in T. S. Eliot's plays are mostly determined by those plays' main situations. We may think of the dismal London flat of Sweeney Agonistes, of Canterbury Cathedral in Murder in the Cathedral, or Wishwood manor in The Family Reunion. Occasionally, Eliot introduces imaginary locations...

The Fourth Tempter

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Dídac Llorens (1 août 2021)

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In Murder in the Cathedral (1936), four tempters visit Thomas Becket as he retires to his rooms. The first three tempt the Archbishop and former Chancellor of England with royal favour, carefree joy, political power, and the support of English lords. An unexpected, mysterious Fourth Tempter ("you kn...

More Liberty with Myth

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Dídac Llorens (17 juil. 2021)

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Michael Redgrave as Orin in Dudley Nichols's film adaptation of Mourning Becomes Electra Michael Redgrave played Harry, Lord Monchensey in the first production of T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion (1939). Curiously, a few years later, he would be cast as Orin Mannon in the film adaptation (1947) of E...

Pottery, Music and a Garden

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Dídac Llorens (3 juil. 2021)

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In its opening, "Burnt Norton" (1935) leads us from abstract relativisation of sequential time "into the rose-garden". The experience is imbued with factual uncertainty: "what might have been," "the passage which we did not take," "the door we never opened," "shall we follow?," "then a cloud passed,...

Choral Voices

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Dídac Llorens (19 juin 2021)

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First edition of Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) The character of Louis in Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves (1931) is often assumed to have been inspired by T. S. Eliot. Louis is a foreigner in England, always self-consciously trying to fit in; he is characterised by his need for order, and by his...

That Peculiar Man's Plays

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Dídac Llorens (5 juin 2021)

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Photograph from the original production of Look Back in Anger In a 2016 interview, Julie Walters declared that when she started her acting career in the early 70s, "you’d hear middle-class actors trying to sound working class because it was cool". She lamented the decline of "working-class drama" th...

The Perfect Line

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Dídac Llorens (23 mai 2021)

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On May 18, the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas (UNED) held a one-day seminar to publicise its research projects, including "T. S. Eliot's Drama from Spain: Translation, Critical Study Performance (TEATREL-SP)." One of its researchers, Natalia Carbajosa Palmero, gave the lec...

Here by Thames' Side

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Dídac Llorens (8 mai 2021)

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In one of his diary entries for the year 1662, Samuel Pepys describes how the city of London welcomed Catherine of Braganza, the new Queen, with pageants on the Thames: "all the show consisted chiefly in the number of boats and barges - and two Pageants, one of a King and another of a Queene, with h...

Clues on a Treasure Hunt

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Dídac Llorens (25 avr. 2021)

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Sweeney Agonistes (1926) was T. S. Eliot's first attempt to write verse drama. Unlike the plays of his maturity, it projects the novelty of experimentation and has been accorded the prestige of modernity. It is chronologically and stylistically closer to Eliot's early work, which established him as...

Shocks and Violations

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Dídac Llorens (10 avr. 2021)

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The Furies are central to T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion (1939). Initially, we are led to believe that the protagonist, Harry, has murdered his wife and is consequently being pursued by these avenging spirits. However, as the play draws to a close, the Furies show Harry a path of expiation and of...

Poet in the Playhouse

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Dídac Llorens (27 mars 2021)

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Ralph Fiennes in rehearsal of Four Quartets In 2009, Faber and Faber published an audio recording of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1936-1942), read by Ralph Fiennes. The actor recently announced that he is to direct and act in a dramatic adaptation of this poetic sequence. There have been other attem...

If He Becomes a Famous Man

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Dídac Llorens (13 mars 2021)

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In 1952, John Peter published "A New Interpretation of The Waste Land," reading the poem as a homoerotic elegy for "a young man" loved by the main speaker. As explained in a postcript from 1969, the essay was withdrawn at Eliot's displeased request and effectually censored for seventeen years. Inter...

A Dramatist's Progress

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Dídac Llorens (27 févr. 2021)

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T. S. Eliot's years as a dramatist may be dismissed as the renowned poet's retreat to a territory of comfortably lower creative standards. Nothing could be further from the truth, however: from the mid 1930s onwards, Eliot embarked on a painstaking learning process that was also a progress towards h...