Helen Gardner (critic)

Helen Louise Gardner (13 February 1908 – 4 June 1986) was an English literary critic and Merton Professor of English Literature. She was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1967. Quotes Walter Hilton, in The Scale of Perfection, one of the most popular books of devotion in England in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, has a long discussion on three ways of loving God. John Donne: A Note on Elegie V, "His Picture" The Modern Language Review 39 4 1944 333–337 00267937 10.2307/3716926 The term 'metaphysical poets' came into being long after the poets to whom we apply it were dead. Samuel Johnson, who coined it, did so with the consciousness that it was a piece of literary slang, that he was giving it a kind of nickname. The Metaphysical Poets https://books.google.com/books?id=zS_EXPFEtKwC&pg=PA15 15 1967 Penguin Books 978-0-14-042038-8 (1st edition, 1957) Lewis established his reputation as a scholar with his first book, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Traditions (1936). This remains a great and profoundly original contribution to literary history. Whether one agrees or disagrees, in detail or in large, with its thesis, after reading this book one's whole imagination of the past has been extended and changed. Lewis recovered for the ordinary reader what had been lost for centuries, the power to read allegory and to respond to the allegorical mode of thinking. He was able to do so because he was a born allegorist himself. Clive Staples Lewis, 1898–1963 Proceedings of he British Academy (for 1965) 1966 51 417–428 http://publications.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/pubs/proc/files/51p417.pdf (quote from p, 423) The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman are distinguished from Eliot's earlier plays by their author's obvious desire to accommodate himself to the conventions of the stage at their most conventional level. In the earlier plays, Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Cathedral, and The Family Reunion, Eliot was working in the experimental theatre of the 'thirties, using such devices as the chorus, the direct appeal to the audience, soliloquy, lyrical solos and duets, and ritual and symbolic acts. In these last plays he deliberately wrote within the limits of what has been contemptuously called the "West End Play", or what Mr. Terence Rattigan called "Plays for Aunt Edna". The Comedies of T. S. Eliot The Sewanee Review 74 1 1966 153–175 27541390 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27541390 What was the modern movement in English and American literature has now passed into history. We have to call it the 'modernist movement'. Its great figures—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Wallace Stevens—are now well entrenched in academic syllabuses. The vultures and the crows have moved in over the old battlefields. Writers who once aroused a passionate enthusiasm and as passionate a disapproval are now the prey of bibliographers and textual critics, biographers and editors of letters, and students seeking doctorates. In Defence of the Imagination https://books.google.com/books?id=djMMlJ0sXwIC&pg=PA12 12 1982 Harvard University Press 978-0-674-44540-6 External links Category:University of Oxford faculty Category:Editors from England Category:1908 births Category:1986 deaths Category:Literary critics Category:University of Cambridge alumni Category:Fellows of the British Academy