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Book by MSU author depicts pivotal year of poet T.S. Eliot |
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Wednesday, 28 October 2009 |
For the Bulldog Beat
As with many of his generation, future Nobel Prize winner T.S. Eliot spent a year abroad following his 1910 graduation from Harvard University.
Considered among the 20th century’s greatest poets, Eliot (1888-1965) chose Paris to become immersed in the intellectual and cultural life of Europe. His time in the Continent’s most cosmopolitan city and, in particular, the profound impact it had on his artistic development are being brought to life in a new book by Nancy Hargrove of Mississippi State University.
“T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University Press of Florida) was released earlier this month.
The 324-page scholarly study by Hargrove, a William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at MSU, uses journals, newspaper accounts, guidebooks, and other material to illustrate in detail the extensive influences of Eliot’s Parisian year. Also included are more than 40 period illustrations that give insights into the time.
In addition to study with noted philosopher Henri Bergson, Eliot’s influences included his cultural exposures to the City of Light’s Wagnerian operas, Ballet Russes and Cubist artists. On another level, they also involved theatrical melodramas, detective comedies and other forms of more popular entertainment.
With these varied influences and other experiences, Eliot would go on to an illustrious career that included such works as “The Waste Land,” “Four Quartets” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Hargrove said the idea of researching the poet’s Parisian year initially was suggested as she was completing her 1970 doctoral dissertation at the University of South Carolina.
“I researched and wrote this book during my last 15 years at Mississippi State,” said Hargrove, who retired last year. “It was the most intriguing and interesting research project in my 38-year career.”
The research took her to major libraries and museums in Paris, where she “made exciting discoveries on a daily basis about what was going on in the cultural arena in 1910-11.”
Advance praise for the book from scholars such as Benjamin Lockerd Jr. describes it as “a remarkable work of intellectual biography and cultural history.”
Hargrove’s earlier literary studies include “Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot,” released in 1978, and “The Journey Toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath’s Poetry of 1956-1959,” in 1994. She also has published some 45 essays in books and journals on the works of Eliot, Plath, Yeats, Faulkner, Welty, and Shakespeare.
Over an MSU career that began in 1970, Hargrove earned four Fulbright awards and was named the Mississippi Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.
In 2007, the John Grisham Master Teacher was honored with the Best Essay Award of the scholarly journal The South Atlantic Review. For more information, contact Hargrove at 323-6941 or
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 07 November 2009 )
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