Product Description

As a poet, editor and essayist, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth century poetry. This selection, which was made by Eliot himself, includes many of his most celebrated works, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land". Other volumes in this series, include: "Auden", "Betjemen", "Plath", "Hughes", and "Yeats".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7305 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

About the Author
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888. He was educated at Harvard, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at Merton College, Oxford. His early poetry was profoundly influenced by the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Laforgue. In his academic studies he specialised in philosophy and logic. His doctoral thesis was on F. H. Bradley. He settled in England in 1915, the year in which he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and also met his contemporary Ezra Pound for the first time. After teaching for a year or so he joined Lloyds Bank in the City of London in 1917, the year in which he published his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations. In 1919 Poems was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. His first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, appeared in 1920. His most famous work, The Waste Land, was published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce's Ulysses. The poem was included in the first issue of his journal The Criterion, which he founded and edited. Three years later he left the bank to become a director of Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber. His Poems 1909-25 was one of the original titles published by Geoffrey Faber's new firm, and the basis of his standard Collected Poems 1909-1962. In 1927 he was received into the Church of England and also became a British citizen. Ash Wednesday was published at Easter 1930. His masterpiece Four Quartets began with 'Burnt Norton' in 1936, continued with 'East Coker' in 1940, 'The Dry Salvages' in 1941 and 'Little Gidding' in 1942. The separate poems were gathered together as one work in 1943.Eliot's writing for the theatre began with the satirical 'Sweeney Agonistes' fragments. In 1934 he wrote the London churches' pageant play 'The Rock', the choruses from which are preserved in Collected Poems, and the next year he was commissioned by the Canterbury Festival to write Murder in the Cathedral, about the martyrdom of St Thomas a Beckett. The Family Reunion followed in 1939, when he also published his children's classic, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the jacket drawn by Eliot himself. (The Possum was Eliot's alias among friends). He later wrote three more verse plays, all of which were premiered at the Edinburgh Festival: The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman. A film of Murder in the Cathedral was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.Eliot's most important literary criticism is collected in Selected Essays 1917-1932, which he enlarged in 1951. There are a number of other volumes of lectures and essays, among them The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, For Lancelot Andrewes, On Poetry and Poets, and two works of social criticism - The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Eliot was appointed to the Order of Merit in January 1948 and in the Autumn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He married for the second time in 1957, to Valerie Fletcher. He died in January 1965. There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey, beside those to Tennyson and Browning. His ashes are in St Michael's Church, East Coker, the Somerset village from which his ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated to America in 1667.After his death his widow edited the long-lost original manuscript of the The Waste Land and a volume of his letters. She also commissioned editions of his early poems Inventions of a March Hare and his Clark and Turnbull lectures The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats provided the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber's dance musical Cats, which has been performed all over the world for the past 25 years.

Customer Reviews

Striking
Eliot's poetry is not for the faint hearted. This collection consits of a range of his poetry from 1917 to 1930.The most famous of course, 'The Waste Land' is all in here. Anyone familiar with the Modernist movenment of the 1920s will easily see why 'The Waste Land' is a firm contender for one of the best pieces of Modernist Literature. It depicts a world that is decaying, spine-less, fruit-less and corrupt. 'The Waste Land' is a very personal analysis of Modern post-war life and I think it's easy to feel that his poetry can be slightly insular, in that it's quite difficult to understand what Eliot is trying to convey to the public, if anything.
However, there are some easier poems in here, with 'The Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock' coming in as one of my top pieces of poetry because of Eliot's striking word play.
I'd really recommend you read this because I think although it's rather personal to Eliot himself, I think it's equally personal to the individual reader, and there will be something in here that attracts you personally to his poetry.

A warning about the book description
I give the book itself 5 stars. I don't have any comments to add to those already made, but did want to point out one thing:

don't be misled by the 'product description', as I was, which you get when viewing the details for this book on Amazon, which states:


Book Description
Key Features-
Study methods
Introduction to the text
Summaries with critical notes
Themes and techniques
Textual analysis of key passages
Author biography
Historical and literary background
Modern and historical critical approaches
Chronology
Glossary of literary terms --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

This description DOES NOT describe the book - none of these are included (there are a few notes on The Wasteland, but that is it).
If you click on the word 'paperback' it takes you to another page showing a book of York Notes - this is what the 'product description' is describing.

special
There has to be something unusual about a post modern poem that can stand the test of time. Thoroughly edited by Ezra Pound, the poem remains a peculiar work which made Eliot famous. He was asked about it throughout his life, sometimes referring to it as trivia, at other times telling people it was genius. In a poem where it is open to interpretation what is really going on, or who it is about, the language is unfailingly provocative. It's easy to see the empty, crushed people flowing over London Bridge - he means office workers whose lives are meaningless. The fortune teller, the fog, the pub at closing time, conjur up such familiar scenes and Eliot drenches them in the boredom and possibility they provide in real life.

Like all poetry, it offers something deeper and more interesting than most prose, and leaves you feeling enlivened. However, Eliot never again wrote something this good, so one wonders whether it was a strange fluke.