Robert Langbaum Information Agency. He has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University (1961-2), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1969-1970), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1972-3), the University of Virginia Center for Advanced Studies (1982), and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (1987), and grants from American Council of Learned Societies (1961, 75-6). Langbaum’s first book, (1957), takes issue with T. S. Eliot whom he admires as poet and critic. He objects, however, to Eliot’s redrawing of the literary tradition as beginning with the early seventeenth-century witty poets and the witty side of Shakespeare. Eliot names this
T. S. Eliot for the authorship of one scene and the choruses. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the production of "The Rock", and later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, "Murder in the Cathedral", concerning the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot], "Murder in the Cathedral" and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his