The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual is the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the 2015 edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays. To celebrate the publication of Volume 8 of the Annual, we are making the following article free to read throughout September 2026:
‘Barbarous Cuisine: T. S. Eliot in Ireland, 1936 and 1940: 46th Annual T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture’ by Fran Brearton.
We invited author Fran Brearton to introduce the article and highlight its importance:
In his introduction to the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, W.B. Yeats describes Eliot as the poet who ‘has produced his great effect upon his generation because he has described men and women that get out of bed or into it from mere habit; in describing this life that has lost heart his own art seems grey, cold, dry’. The Waste Land, despite ‘much that is moving in symbol and imagery’, has ‘much monotony of accent’; ‘I longed’, says Yeats, ‘for the vivid colour and light of Rousseau and Courbet’; ‘I could not endure the grey middle-tint’.
Both here, and in a radio broadcast on ‘Modern Poetry’ the same year, Yeats’s concern is, in part, with questions of influence and legacy. Eliot emerges during World War I as ‘the most revolutionary man in poetry during my lifetime’, but Yeats qualifies that apparent praise: ‘his revolution was stylistic alone’. Acknowledging, if disliking, the ‘satiric intensity’ of ‘this new poetry’, and its influence on both the English war poets and the ‘thirties generation’, he separates Irish poetry from the ‘social bitterness’ and ‘pessimism’ associated with an Eliotic legacy: ‘modern Irish poetry…moves in a different direction and belongs to a different story…. Because Ireland has a still living folk tradition, her poets cannot get it out of their heads that they themselves, good-tempered or bad-tempered, tall or short, will be remembered by the common people.’
Yeats is perhaps not wholly just to Eliot here, and his selections for the Oxford Book indicate as much; Eliot’s own earlier, often harsh judgements on Yeats, as articulated between 1919 and 1936, are no less demonstrably flawed—as much by sins of omission (the major poetic works by Yeats from 1914-1938 he never mentions) as anything else. This is territory that has been authoritatively mapped by critics and editors of Yeats and Eliot, among them Richard Ellmann, Ronald Schuchard, John Kelly, and Peter McDonald; more broadly, it is a brave soul who ventures into the field of Yeats-Eliot scholarship—a packed arena—in the hopes of making it ‘new’.
Invited to give the 2025 Eliot memorial lecture in Dublin, my thoughts turned immediately to Eliot’s own, and well-known, Dublin memorial lecture on W.B. Yeats, delivered in the spring of 1940. For all that Yeats and Eliot sniped at each other as they affirmed their different aesthetic principles, it is unsurprising that Eliot was asked to give that first Yeats memorial lecture. Who better, in one sense, to speak in memory of the greatest modern (Irish) poet of his age than that other modernist giant who has himself, in the decades since 1940, shared the critical space with Yeats in numerous book title/subtitle variations of the formula ‘Yeats, Eliot, and[Poet#3, often Pound]’. Moreover, having met for the first time in c.1914-15, Yeats and Eliot were, as Yeats’s biographer R.F. Foster describes it, ‘on lunching terms’, encountering each other fairly frequently, and presumably amicably—or at least civilly—in the London of the 1920s and ‘30s. If some sense of noblesse oblige as well as self-interest informed Eliot’s acceptance of the invitation, it’s also possible Yeats himself had worked on the principle of keeping his friends close, but Eliot (via Pound) closer.
Nevertheless, it was not Eliot’s well-documented and extensively scrutinised relations with Yeats, or indeed with Joyce, that brought him to Ireland for the first time four years earlier, in January 1936—at least not directly. Yeats, indeed, was wintering in Majorca in 1935-6, coping with severe illness while mired in Swami and scandal. Instead, Eliot ventured to Ireland at the invitation of some of the more anti-Yeatsian Irish critics and clerics of the period, sharing a platform in Dublin with Daniel Corkery and a young Jesuit student Roland Burke-Savage; and his lecture intervened (whether advertently or not) in debates central to the ‘Irish-Ireland’ thinking of the 1920s-30s. The extent to which Eliot’s critical writings were absorbed, and repurposed, by Irish writers and critics of the period—in which context Karl O’Hanlon’s pioneering work on Eliot’s appeal to the Irish 1916 revolutionaries is crucial—is a question all the more pertinent because of Eliot’s negativities towards Yeats’s ‘pagan’ aesthetic, and—as Christopher Dowd and others have shown—in light of Eliot’s clear anti-Irish prejudices.
My own interests centre on tradition and influence in Irish poetry, both in acknowledging Yeats’s centrality, but also pushing back in some degree against the particular Yeatsian narrative with which I began, wherein ‘the War’ (and by extension Eliotic influence) belongs to the English not the Irish story. How, why, and to what extent Eliot, so dominant in other contexts, influences Irish twentieth century culture, and, conversely, to what extent his Irish encounters affected Eliot’s own thinking and development, are some of the questions which prompted further exploration of his two brief Irish visits.
At the same time, since those visits understandably garner little or no attention in Eliot’s biographies, what began as the process of telling the biographical story of ‘Eliot in Ireland’ before moving on to questions of influence and reception also became, in the course of writing this lecture, something of an end in itself. And once the sequence of events and encounters is reconstructed, it becomes apparent why the biographical story of Eliot in Dublin serves as a key to understanding some of the wider issues concerning Eliot’s reception in Ireland.
Both visits, unusually, have a photographic record: the only image from 1936 is a very grainy picture from Ireland’s Sunday Independent; photographs from 1940 are reproduced in the article. But other pictures emerge too—of an Eliot meeting with serious-minded Eliot-devotees, among them modernist, experimental poets such as Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey; of an Eliot negotiating Irish Catholic establishment figures’ hostility to Yeats and Joyce; and, most tantalising of all perhaps, of an ultra-conservative, High Anglican and monarchist Eliot carousing in Dublin with some of the leading lights of the Easter 1916 Rising as George V lay on his deathbed.
I have never been persuaded that meeting one’s literary idols from a past age (see Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris) is something to be desired; but there are, perhaps, occasions when one might wish to have been a fly on the wall.
To read all articles from the Annual, recommend a subscription of the journal to your institution >
Follow us for more updates
Liverpool University Press Blog 