This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.

Throughout his career, Robert Lowell showed an immense respect and admiration for T. S. Eliot. The friendship between the two writers and the importance of Eliot’s example as a poet are well documented in Lowell’s letters and essays, as well as in poems written under Eliot’s potent influence. Eliot’s rendering of speech, his ironic intelligence, his adoption of myth and symbol, and his liberal use of quotation and allusion all find their way into Lowell’s poetry. At the same time, as this chapter reveals, there are some significant diversions and differences of opinion. Lowell perseveres in writing a poetry that is impersonal in the manner prescribed by Eliot, while also drawing on subject matter that is candidly autobiographical. One of the key points in the chapter is that Lowell acknowledged Eliot as a "confessional" poet several years before the term was applied to his own compositions in Life Studies. Although the two poets have much in common in terms of their theological interests, they also differ profoundly in their views on questions of sin, death, and salvation.

This chapter considers Ellison’s contradictory relationship to the black writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s. While Ellison met and conversed with Alain Locke about black writing as an undergraduate at Tuskegee, and benefitted directly from mentoring by African American creative forebears like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright after his move to New York in the late 1930s, he also expressly distanced himself from these figures later. In chapters like 1963-64’s canonical “The World and the Jug,” for example, Ellison emphasizes the influence of various white modernists like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and André Malraux as he downplays his debt to Hughes and Wright, both of whom bookended the politicized aesthetic of the Renaissance. As a counterpoint, I consider Ellison stylistic points of resemblance with these earlier black modernists to suggest a more substantial genealogical connection than Ellison himself admitted at times in his own rhetorical self-fashioning.

This chapter surveys Ellison’s complex relationship with other key Modernist writers, as expressed both explicitly in his letters and chapters, and implicitly in his short stories, in Invisible Man, and in Three Days Before the Shooting … . Examining key moments in his intellectual formation, such as his encounters with Eliot and Joyce during his undergraduate studies at Tuskegee, it also maps out the paradox of his attested admiration for but rare intertextual dialogue with Hemingway, and his ambivalent and shifting positions on Faulkner. Lastly, it suggests that despite Ellison’s and Morrison’s mutual and clearly voiced antipathy, these two writers have far more in common, particularly in terms of their conceptions of Modernism, than either would like to admit. Throughout my overview, I will take account of the best pre-existing scholarship on this subject.

The conceptual framework that accompanies stylistic virtue was the product of over two thousand years of rhetorical, critical, and philosophical development, much of which appears to collapse in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, the Afterword suggests that stylistic virtue persisted in constituent and strategically obscured forms: for example, in T.S. Eliot’s analysis of stylistic “impersonality” and I.A. Richards’s conception of the poem as “pseudo-statement.” The Afterword goes on to claim that contemporary virtue theory provides a promising avenue for the continued defense of style, and of aesthetic value more generally, as an ethical good, offering an innovative way of defending the humanities at a moment of contemporary crisis.

Thomas Hardy was the first poet that Seamus Heaney discovered in his boyhood in Mossbawn, where poems set to memory and scenes from the novels began to shape an earth-rooted poetic in which he envisioned the poet as Antaeus and the poem as a ploughshare turning over ancestral ghosts and disappearing objects for the poetic reconstitution of a vanishing 'country of the mind'. When he eventually discovered Yeats, Eliot and other modern poets indifferent to Hardy, he saw their modern visionary and intellectual poetics as his Hercules, writing in 'Antaeus and Hercules' of their threat to his earthbound poetics as 'pap for the dispossessed'. Heaney’s full engagement with the moderns was accompanied by regular retreats into his Hardy haven and identification with Kavanagh, Auden, Larkin and others sympathetic to the Hardy tradition. The Antaeus-Hercules conflict was not to become a feared defeat but a liberating reconciliation borne of his study of the Hardy-Yeats-Eliot breakthroughs into the miraculous, discovering through them the balance of earth and lift essential to great poetry.

In lectures and interviews, Seamus Heaney spoke candidly and revealingly about the influence of T.S. Eliot on his poetry and poetics. There was never an immediate or instinctive allegiance; rather, it was an acquired taste, a matter of having to ‘grow up’ to Eliot. Eliot’s essays shaped Heaney’s own prose writings in the early 1970s and Eliot’s idea of the ‘auditory imagination’ had a profound effect on his critical methods. Increasingly, Eliot’s example in Four Quartets gave sustenance to Heaney’s poetry. ‘Little Gidding’ came to be seen by Heaney as an exemplary instance of how the imagination might endure the destruction of war, while the mystical qualities of Four Quartets helped to shape the visionary poetics of Seeing Things. In the later work, Eliot’s presence is pervasive and subtly assimilated, often manifesting itself in Heaney’s adaptations of Virgil and Dante.

Amanda Golden addresses Plath’s pedagogical strategies in order to shed new light on the ways that her identities as a student, teacher, and poet overlap. Focusing on her teaching of modernism, including the work of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Henry James, Golden shows how Plath’s later writing refashions the language she used as a teacher. Golden draws heavily on the teaching notes Plath made whilst working in the English Department at Smith College, combing through Plath’s lists, lectures, and the passages from critical texts that she highlighted.