Helen Gardner (critic) Cambridge offered Gardner the new chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, but she declined, in part because she had heard that the university's first choice, C.S. Lewis, had changed his mind about refusing the position. In 1966, she became Merton Professor of English literature in the University of Oxford, the first woman to hold this chair. Her specialist areas were T. S. Eliot, the metaphysical poets, Milton and religious poetry, with many essays published on these subjects, as well as on literary criticism itself. She edited "The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1950" (1972) and "The Metaphysical Poets". She
T. S. Eliot in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in "The Times Literary Supplement" on 21 June 1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to "poetry"." In October 1922, Eliot published "The Waste Land" in "The Criterion". Eliot's dedication to "il miglior fabbro" ("the better craftsman") refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication. It was composed during a period