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 a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. Although Eliot did not finish the play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titled "Fragment of a Prologue" (1926) and "Fragment of an Agon" (1927), were published together in 1932 as "Sweeney Agonistes". Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as one. A pageant play by Eliot called "The Rock" was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted credit only