Helen Gardner (critic) Helen Gardner (critic) Dame Helen Louise Gardner, (13 February 1908 – 4 June 1986) was an English literary critic and academic. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot. Helen Louise Gardner was born in Finchley, Middlesex in 1908, the middle child and only daughter of the journalist Charles Gardner and his wife, also named Helen. She was eleven when her father died and the family thereafter made their home with her grandparents. Helen's mother was highly ambitious for her gifted daughter, who demonstrated artistic talent from an early age. Gardner's early
T. S. Eliot And the writers of "Time" magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem like "The Waste Land". John Crowe Ransom wrote negative criticisms of Eliot's work but also had positive things to say. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised "The Waste Land" for its "extreme disconnection", Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work and admitted that Eliot was a talented poet. Addressing some of the common criticisms directed against "The Waste Land" at the time, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems at first sight remarkably disconnected and confused... [however] a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the