Participants may register for their chosen seminar simply by sending an email to tseliotsociety@gmail.com (please put “Peer Seminar” in the subject line by Monday, 2 June. Seminar participants will pre-circulate papers to the others enrolled in their seminar on 6 June. The seminars do have a size limit and are awarded on a first-come first-served basis.
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual Prize: Each year the Society awards a prize, sponsored by the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, to the best seminar paper written by an early-career scholar. Graduate students and recent PhDs are eligible (degree received within the past four years for those not yet employed in a tenure-track position, the past two years for those holding tenure-track positions).
Here are the three seminars we are offering this year:
T. S. Eliot in/and Translation
Nicoletta Asciuto, University of York, and Michelle A. Taylor, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge
“The work of translation,” T. S. Eliot wrote in 1927, “is to make something foreign, or something remote in time, live with our own life” (“Baudelaire in Our Time”). At the same time, Eliot also believed — writing of his experience reading Dante — that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” even though (as he wrote elsewhere) “a feeling or emotion expressed in a different language is not the same feeling or emotion” (Dante [1929], “The Social Function of Poetry”). Eliot’s own life and work bear out the complicated balance, or dialectic, he perceived between a poet’s duty to his own language and culture (perhaps too narrowly conceived?) and the poet’s imperative to absorb the stimulating influence of foreign poetry’s untranslatable affects: he read, at one point or another, in at least eight other languages, and even undertook a translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase in 1930. In his lifetime, Eliot saw his poetry undergo widespread and rapid translation: before he died, The Waste Land — itself a poem in many languages — was translated into more than 15 languages, including Chinese, Hebrew, Serbian, and Persian.
This seminar invites papers on Eliot in translation and Eliot’s relationship to translation, broadly conceived. Topics we might consider include:
- Eliot’s critical insights or philosophy of translation
- Implications of Eliot’s philosophy of language for translation and translators
- The politics of translating Eliot / Eliot and the politics of translation
- Translations of Eliot’s works
- Citations of Eliot in literatures outside of English (another kind of translation)
- Critical reflections on the process of translating Eliot
- Eliot’s use of non-English sources, in and out of translation
- Trans-mediations of Eliot’s works (e.g., adaptations for stage, screen, music, etc.)
Nicoletta Asciuto is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Modern Literature at the University of York (UK). She is the author of Brilliant Modernism: Cultures of Light and Modernist Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press 2025). She has published various articles on modernist poetry, especially on T. S. Eliot, the latest of which was published in Religion & Literature. She is co-investigator for York on a project funded by the European Commission, “EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective.” Nicoletta has also published literary translations, the latest of which feature in Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations, edited by Emilie Morin (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Her Italian translation of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris. A Poem (1920), the first translation of Mirrlees’s work into Italian, is forthcoming in March 2025 with Interno Poesia.
Michelle A. Taylor is the Armstrong T. S. Eliot Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, having previously held a One-Year Postdoctoral Fellowship at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (2023-2024) and the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellowship at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (2021-2023). She has published on Eliot in a variety of venues, including College Literature, Modernism/Modernity Print+, transatlantica, Eliot Now, and The New Yorker. She is currently at work on two book projects: Clique Lit: Coterie Culture and the Making of Modernism, based on her doctoral dissertation, and her current fellowship project, T. S. Eliot, Translation, and the World Stage.
T. S. Eliot and Irish Poetry
T. S. Eliot had a somewhat uneasy relationship with Ireland and its poetry. At times, Irish poetry has also had a somewhat uneasy relationship with Eliot. Nevertheless, any adequate account of modern poetry associated with the island of Ireland is unimaginable without considering the impact upon it of Eliot and his work. Similarly, Ireland and its poetry played a notable role in Eliot’s own thinking and writing, as well as its critical and creative reception. The figure of W. B. Yeats looms large in such considerations. Eliot at various points expressed misgivings as regards Yeats’s cultural nationalism, and his philosophical and theoretical heterodoxy. Yet in 1935 in a seventieth birthday tribute in The Criterion, Eliot unequivocally heralded him as “the greatest poet of his time.” By then Eliot’s own work had started to have a profound impact on younger Irish poets. These included Thomas MacGreevy, the author Thomas Stearns Eliot: A Study (1931) and before that the poetic sequence “Crón Tráth na nDéithe” – a journey through the wasted land of a post-Civil War Dublin. Eliot’s impress can further be seen in the work of several other poets of the mid-twentieth century of a somewhat modernist bent, including Denis Devlin and Sheila Wingfield. It also offered a radical poetic seedbed later reclaimed by poets as various as Thomas Kinsella, Trevor Joyce, and Ellen Dillon. A further Faber-published lineage might be traced from Louis MacNeice to Richard Murphy to Seamus Heaney to Paul Muldoon. The public authority Eliot claimed as a poet-critic clearly influenced Heaney’s career as well as those of Eavan Boland and Tom Paulin (another Faber poet). Nevertheless, disquiet at the considerable, transatlantic influence of Eliot, especially as regards the innovations he came to be associated with, also intersects with the recurrent attempts of some to forge a distinctive, national poetic – such as when in 1951 Padraic Fallon reflected that Faber’s books had ‘steamrollered’ his generation of Irish poets ‘out of existence’.
The seminar invites papers on any aspect of Eliot’s engagement with Irish poetry, as well as on any aspects of Irish poetry’s engagement with Eliot’s body of work. Topics might include:
- Eliot’s engagement with Ireland and its poets
- Eliot’s critical reception in Ireland
- Eliot’s influence on Irish poetry
- Questions of formal innovation versus poetic traditionalism
- Intersections of modernism, cosmopolitanism and nationalism
- Poetic uses of myth, history, philosophy and religion
- Poetic responses to conflict
- The place of the long poem and sequence in Irish poetry
- The ideologies of the poetic and the aesthetic
Tom Walker is Associate Professor in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. His publications on various aspects of Irish literature and modern poetry include Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time (Oxford University Press, 2015). He has also co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Derek Mahon: A Retrospective (Liverpool University Press, 2024), and a 2019 special issue of Modernist Cultures on ‘Collaborative Poetics’.
Creative Writing
In this seminar participants are encouraged to reflect on the innovation enabled by modernism—including, but not limited to, Eliot’s iterations of such—and its implications for their individual and collaborative poetic practice. Some of the ideas we might explore include:
● Renovations of forms, such as the quatrain
● Fragmentation and collage
● Dramatic verse, dramatic monologue and performance
● Editing and collaboration
● Creative translation
● Problematics of originality and continued Romantic legacies
It is envisaged, however, that the direction of the seminar will be primarily led by work submitted by the attendees. In place of a position paper, participants should submit poetic work-in-progress of no more than 30 lines in length. Visual and performance-based work is also welcome: please submit audio or video of no more than 3 minutes in duration.
Kit Fryatt teaches English and Creative Writing at Dublin City University. His publications include four books of poems and a monograph on the work of Austin Clarke. Book of Inversions, a collection of poems based on medieval and early modern Irish originals (co-authored with Harry Gilonis) is published this year by corrupt press.formation forthcoming]
The Evolving Poetics of T. S. Eliot
Is there a well-known work of Eliot’s that is in need of a fresh look? Is there a lesser-known work that deserves more attention? Can we identify new patterns linking multiple works in Eliot’s oeuvre? This seminar will focus on approaches that provide us with new possibilities for reading Eliot’s writing up close. How should we understand the status of the biographical in Eliot’s poems, now that so many more details of his biography are known? Are there new ways to understand the effect Eliot’s poetic influences had on particular works? Are there religious implications in the poetry or plays we haven’t yet discerned, or have we allowed religion to crowd out other concerns? What about Eliot’s lifelong efforts to write literature with a popular appeal, even as his reputation for difficulty and distance from the public grew? In this seminar we will consider the poetic techniques Eliot adopted, adapted, invented, and surrendered in the course of his poetic development. We can’t build more elaborate theories about Eliot’s significance without careful attention to the words themselves that Eliot spent a lifetime learning “to get the better of.” Where should we direct that attention?
Vincent Sherry is Professor of English and Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches and writes about literary modernism in Britain and Ireland. His hugely influential books include Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford, 1993); The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford, 2003), Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge, 2015); and, as editor, the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge, 2005) and the Cambridge History of Modernism (Cambridge, 2017). He is a longtime board member of the International T. S. Eliot Society.
A note on how Peer Seminars work:
Peer seminars are fairly small (usually no more than 12 people in each). Participants pre-circulate short position papers (about 5-6 pages) by Friday, 6 June. You will hear from your seminar leader sometime prior to that date, with information about where and in what form to share your paper with the leader and the other seminar participants. In the seminars themselves, you’ll be discussing each other’s work as well as Eliot’s, making connections between your shared areas of interest and your own works-in-progress. You will be asked to read all of the short papers of your fellow seminar participants before the start of the conference and to come prepared with questions and suggestions based on your readings. The seminars will meet on the morning of the first day of the conference (Wednesday, 2 July).
