T. S. Eliot Books

Ellman's book is one I return to as I teach Eliot and Pound. Her work is powerfully, and usefully, illuminating, especially in its examination of the interrelation between (aspects of) theory and literature. I especially admire her use of Freud and Bataille in her reading of "The Waste Land" (via the notions of the "uncanny" and the "abject"). Her readings do in fact read the poems instead of enacting the masturbatory fantasies that academics can sometimes fall prey to. This is an unjustly unknown book: Ellman's critical intelligence is staggering.

I hope that no one's reviewed this because they just didn't think to, and not because they've never read it, because that would make me sad.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is an ode to being on the outside, looking in, and not being sure about what you see there. Prufrock (the narrator of the poem) thinks himself a fool, a prince, a messenger, he contemplates an overwhelming question, he dares to eat a peach, and part his hair from behind, and even when he grows old (and wears the ends of his trousers rolled), he does this all alone.

though the poem opens with an invitation, there is little else in the piece that leads the reader to believe that Prufrock is happy for our company, or even aware of it at all.

I borrowed this book from the library. It is fantastic and opened up my eyes to much of the beauty of Eliot's masterpiece - the Four Quartets. I had already appreciated these poems, but they are notoriously difficult. By focusing on the meter, but combining this with general comments on the Four Quartets, Reibetanz really does us a service. She spends one chapter on discussing how Eliot developed his meter in earlier works, then devotes a chapter to each of the Four Quartets, finishing with a conclusion.

The writing throughout is clear and non-technical. Even if you have only a basic understanding of meter and literary criticism, you can read it and enjoy it. And clearly Reibetanz loves the work and knows it well. She goes virtually line by line to elucidate the poem and point out subtle things Eliot is doing. Showing first and foremost how he uses meter to accomplish changes in feel, rhythm, mood, etc., and also drawing parallels to his other work. But she also gives interpretations of the sections, which (even if you don't always agree) are wonderful and will definitely spur you on to have more great thoughts of your own.

Highly recommended! How can this be out of print?

So you think the critics give unqualified adoration to our early moderns? Think again. Stanford, in elegant, tight, perfectly clear prose tells the story of the revolution in poetry at the opening of the 20th century from a different point of view, that of the Wintersian formalists. These are the followers and students of the great poet and critic Yvor Winters, whose radically neo-classical views cause a storm of debate in the first half of the century. (See my reviews of Winters books at my amazon site.) Stanford incisively explores the poetry of five great poets and makes a strong case for the stature of Robinson and Winters -- can you believe that? -- above that of the divinely canonized threesome also studied here. You will never read Stevens (who's the best of the remaining three), Pound, or Eliot the same again after you have studied them carefully with Stanford. This is a masterful work of literary criticism and one much needed in our chaotic times in the field of poetry. Moreover, it is a stirring treatise on the value of poetry to life and thought, a comment that would be the summit of praise coming from Yvor. I hope you'll give this great book a try if you love poetry. It might change your whole approach to the art. It's not that Stanford will induce you to leave Eliot and Pound behind, but open you up to greater vistas in the high arts of human language. Be sure to check out my other recommendations at my amazon.com personal site.

It is a great injustice that The Sacred Wood, which ranks amongthe greatest works of literary criticism, has fallen out ofprint...

These essays reveal Eliot's mastery of language. While writing on subjects as abstruse as the blank verse of Christopher Marlowe, Eliot maintains supreme eloquence, never stumbling or descending into awkwardness. Moreover, Eliot has managed to keep his subject matter--which at times is quite obscure--very accessible, comprehensible to anyone willing to make the effort to finish any given essay.

What sets apart Eliot's essays, however, is neither their eloquence nor their accessibility. Rather, it is that Eliot exemplifies the form that good literary criticism should take. Today's literary criticism is largely descriptive, doing little more than dissecting works and analyzing them. Eliot's criticism is critical--he takes a prominent, and extremely complex literary work or trend, and renders a cogent, logical verdict on it. Eliot is not afraid to lambast the staples of the Western literary pantheon. He almost convinces the reader that Hamlet is a bad play. This is criticism as it should be.

I'm gonna give you the brief introduction of this book. It is of my opinion that this work, of art, is so billiant it's almost bizarre. It was quite a treat to read this book, and yet not a marshmallow. In an exciting and captiving recount, Donovan illustrates the uses of various weapons such as the flamethrower, the grenade, the thumbring, and of course...Big Betsy his favorite IED. In his brilliant tale he recounts his battle plans to invade Canada with a "bootle" rocket. Now a little on the author himself. He enjoys Pokemon Battles of Epic Porportions on the weekends, and bringing with him Western Civilization to his parties. Althought the entire work is worth reading, you only have to read the large type headings and be sure to actively read this work.


Durch.

Can it really be twenty years since this major study was published? Can it really be forty since I used to wrestle as an undergraduate with the riddles and oracles of "Four Quartets"? Kearns throws floods of light on that poem in her closing chapter. She shows how Eliot, in wartime, exposes himself to the abysses of the unknown, drawing on Indic as well as Christian traditions, and deliberately rehearsing older traditions in an "off" style to make us sense how they fail before the abyss. The much contested third Quartet ("The Dry Salvages") is vindicated as drawing on Eliot's earliest roots -- the Mississippi seen with the eyes of Whitman and blended with the Ganges. The Indic dimension of the poem was not a minor fad of Eliot's; he had read "The Light of Asia" (Edwin Arnold's versification of the life of the Buddha) as a boy and had studied the Bhagavad Gita and other Indic texts in depths in Harvard. His scholarly grasp of Buddhism enabled him, along with Harvard mentors such as Royce, Babbitt, J. H. Woods and Lanman, to see beyond the blind spots of Hegel and Schopenhauer and to participate in what was a major breakthrough in the understanding of Indian religion. His absorption in Bradley may have had something to do with the analogies between the dialectics of Nagarjuna, proving all dharma to be empty and to break down when they lay claim to substantive identity, and Bradley's deconstruction of such categories as time, space, relation, self. Eliot's mind followed many paths and held them together under the rubric of his faith in the Incarnation. In current inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue the work of literary style and visionary imagination whereby Eliot gave new vibrancy to every tradition he took up may be a beacon toward a "deeper communion" between East and West.

I learned a great deal from this extremely readable book, which argues
that Eliot should be viewed through the lens of his relationship with
popular culture and not just as a literary highbrow. Chinitz shows how
Eliot has been constructed over time by critics and others as an elitist
or stuffy intellectual, and he develops his own intriguing portrayal of
Eliot as someone who wanted to, tried to, and often but not always
succeeded in crossing the "cultural divide," that space between high art
and popular culture. He doesn't just point out pop culture references in
Eliot's work; he also very effectively reveals how various sources,
ranging from popular songs and plays to comedians and comic strips,
influenced Eliot's poetry, his ideas, and the path of his career. The
book leaves you feeling that Eliot needs to be reinterpreted and newly
understood. I found Chinitz's writing style very accessible and
"user-friendly" as well as entertaining.

This is a fascinating book that throws a flood of light on matters about which one had long been curious. Eliot's youth was intense and privileged, a crisscross of stimuli shaping a great poet, who here more than ever is seen as the product of American soil. There are "paths not taken" and "jolly corners" on every side and one could project from this biography a hundred possible Eliots. That the author of so revolutionary as poem as "Prufrock" (at age 23) should devote years to a thesis on F. H. Bradley is only one of the paradoxes of this career.

The puzzles of Eliot's sexuality are illuminated by the provision of a social context in Bostonian Bohemia (which gave Eliot a rather bad reputation among his Harvard elders). He had trouble loving, let alone falling in love with, women: "I should find it very stimulating to have several women fall in love with me -- several, because that makes the practical side less evident." Pacing city streets at night, he was tormented by restless urges, often perverse and obscene. His scabrous wit was laced with ancestral puritan contempt for sex.

The figure of Jean Verdenal, the most lovable in these pages, looms as being for Eliot what Hallam was for Tennyson, and we also meet a brilliant young Yorkshireman, Karl Henry Culpin. Both died in the Great War in 1917. "The Waste Land" offers itself to be read anew as an "anthem for doomed youth."

Eliot's impulsive, unconsummated and catastrophic marriage was the mutual gravitation of two radically conflicted people who thought they understood one another and could each be the other's salvation -- "the awful daring of a moment's surrender" made possible only by not giving themselves time to think.

Throughout the story one is aware of Eliot's stubborn, quirky intelligence, processing the material of his life with unfailing virtuosity and self-confidence, and able to take deep plunges into many domains of "knowledge and experience" (notably in three years' study of Sanskrit and Eastern religion under Woods, Lanman and Anesaki).

Miller commits some odd solecisms, calling the Pantheon (rue Soufflot) the Parthenon, attributing "pray for us at the hour of our death" to the Lord's Prayer, referring to "Wilde's opera, Salome," but his archeology of the poet's youth deals in a sensitive and scholarly way with its sources, making up for various Aspernian holocausts, and he does not exceed the bounds of sensible speculation in his biographical decipherment of the poems.

A. Walton Litz was right on the money after listening to Eliot read his "Waste Land," saying Eliot was essentially a dramatist. Why his poetry takes so well with those who normally don't read poetry. This selection is the most comprehensive of his live and studio recordings. Includes his experimental "Triumphal March from Coriolan" but does not include his brilliant but never-completed play "Sweeney Agonistes" (a play whose truncated rhythm, epilitism, and pauses proceeded both Beckett and Pinter by decades.)

In any case, how can we resist Eliot reciting in his own voice the lines:

"I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought."