From his early ""Curtain Raiser"" to the late Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot took an interest in all the arts, drawing on them for poetic inspiration and for analysis in his prose. T. S. Eliot and the Arts provides extensive, high quality research about his many-sided engagement with painting, sculpture, museum artefacts, architecture, music, drama, music hall, opera and dance, as well as the emerging media of recorded sound, film and radio. Building on the newly published editions of Eliot's prose and poetry, this contemporary research collection opens avenues for understanding Eliot both in his own right as a poet and critic and as a foremost exemplar of interarts modernism.
Preface, Ronald Schuchard; Part I. The Visual Arts 1. Eliot in the Asian Wing 1.1. “Mandarins” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Frances Dickey 1.2. Eliot’s Tour of Asian and African Art in the Museums of Paris and London, Nancy Hargrove 1.3. “Afternoon” in the British Museum, Michael Coyle 2. The Modern Bacchanal: Eliot and Matisse, John Morgenstern 3. Eliot and Italian Painting, Anne Stillman 4. Eliot, Architecture, and Historic Preservation, Joshua Mabie Part II. The Performance Arts 5. The Musical World of Eliot’s Inventions, Frances Dickey; 6. Wagner in The Waste Land 6.1 “Try, if possible, to hear something”: Mediating Wagners, Adrian Paterson 6.2 “So all the women are one woman”: Eliot’s Kundry, Katherine Hobbs 7. Eliot, Stravinsky, and the Rite, T. Austin Graham 8. Beauty Is in the Ear of the Beholder: Eliot, Armstrong, and Ellison, Steven Tracy 9. The Music of Four Quartets 9.1 Into our First World: Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the Music of the Will in Four Quartets, Aakanksha Virkar-Yates 9.2 Eliot and Absolute Music, Michelle Witen 10. Eliot and the Music-Hall Comedian, Barry J. Faulk 11. Evenings at the Phoenix Society: Eliot and the Independent London Theatre, Anthony Cuda 12. Eliot and Dance, Susan Jones; Part III. Eliot and Media 13. Eliot and the Idea of “Media”, David Trotter 14. Eliot and Phonography, Malobika Sarkar 15. Eliot’s Radio Times; or, Listen with Possum, Edward Allen
Frances Dickey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. She is President of the T. S. Eliot Society and the author of The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (2012). John Morgenstern is Lecturer in English at Clemson University. He is the general editor of The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual and the Historian of the T. S. Eliot Society.
Reviews for The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts
The essays assembled in T. S. Eliot and the Arts are genuinely groundbreaking: Eliot’s debt to Asian art, whether Chinese, Japanese, or Indian, his astonishingly varied musical taste, ranging from Wagner to Louis Armstrong, and his sophistication vis-à-vis the then new media of radio and phonography— these are documented impressively in this volume, presenting us with an Eliot we’ve never quite known before. -- Marjorie Perloff
