Study of Eliot's philosophical writings, assessing their impact on his early poetry and literary criticism.

Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: “I’d say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I’m sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.” In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot’s early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot’s poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot’s friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot’s Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot’s poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences. Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.

One of poetry's great voices reviews the creations of his literary forebears with essays on the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, the Metaphysical Poets, and other authors. Plus 4 essays from The Times Literary Supplement.

Early poems by T. S. Eliot collects all of his early work through "The Waste Land." Poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Whispers of Immortality," and "Gerontion" ponder aging and mortality, while "Sweeney Erect," "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Service," and "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" sketch the temptations and agonies of the modern man in the character of Sweeney.Woven throughout with allusions to works in six foreign languages and sporting over fifty footnotes by the author, "The Waste Land" is as notorious for its bleak picture of a post-war world as it is for its density and difficulty.Eliot's flashes of insight bring the everyday into stark relief. Whether suffering an insufferable bore, observing the lives of strangers on the streets, or juxtaposing the sacred and the profane, his sometimes autobiographical vignettes of modern life still feel current a century after they were penned.

What principles connect—and what distinctions separate—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets? The thought-tormented characters in T. S. Eliot’s early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry. The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principles—dialectic and relativism—constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot’s imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence. Brooker considers Eliot’s poetry in three blocks, each represented by a signature masterpiece: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in the poet’s intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive—moving from texts to theories—and comparative—juxtaposing the evolution of Eliot’s mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetry—Brooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot’s poems alongside all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.

The inspiration for the iconic musical Cats, T. S. Eliot's classic and delightful collection of poetry about cats. These lovable cat poems were written by T. S. Eliot for his godchildren and continue to delight children and adults alike. This collection is a curious and artful homage to felines young and old, merry and fierce, small and unmistakably round. This is the ultimate gift for cat and poetry lovers.

T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature, for the first time, considers the full imaginative and moral engagement of one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot, with the Early Modern period of literature in English (1580-1630). This engagement haunted Eliot's poetry and critical writing across his career, and would have a profound impact on subsequent poetry across the world, as well as upon academic literary criticism, and wider cultural perceptions. To this end, the book elucidates and contextualizes several facets of Eliot's thinking and its impact: through establishment of his original and eclectic understanding of the Early Modern period in relation to the literary and critical source materials available to him; through consideration of uncollected and archival materials, which suggest a need to reassess established readings of the poet's career; and through attention to Eliot's resonant formulations about the period in consequent literary, critical and artistic arenas. To the end of his life, Eliot had to fend off the presumption that he had, in some way, 'invented' the Early Modern period for the modern age. Yet the presumption holds some force - it is famously and influentially an implication running through Eliot's essays on that earlier period, and through his many references to its writings in his poetry, that the Early Modern period formed the most exact historical analogy for the apocalyptic events (and consequent social, cultural and literary turmoil) of the first half of the twentieth-century. T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature gives a comprehensive sense of the vital engagement of this self-consciously modern poet with the earlier period he always declared to be his favourite.

The modernist poet T. S. Eliot has been applauded and denounced for decades as a staunch champion of high art and an implacable opponent of popular culture. But Eliot's elitism was never what it seemed. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide refurbishes this great writer for the twenty-first century, presenting him as the complex figure he was, an artist attentive not only to literature but to detective fiction, vaudeville theater, jazz, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley. David Chinitz argues that Eliot was productively engaged with popular culture in some form at every stage of his career, and that his response to it, as expressed in his poetry, plays, and essays, was ambivalent rather than hostile. He shows that American jazz, for example, was a major influence on Eliot's poetry during its maturation. He discusses Eliot's surprisingly persistent interest in popular culture both in such famous works as The Waste Land and in such lesser-known pieces as Sweeney Agonistes. And he traces Eliot's long, quixotic struggle to close the widening gap between high art and popular culture through a new type of public art: contemporary popular verse drama. What results is a work that will persuade adherents and detractors alike to return to Eliot and find in him a writer who liked a good show, a good thriller, and a good tune, as well as a "great" poem.

A collection of poems, some of which had first appeared in Poetry, Blas, Others, The Little Review, and Arts and Letters.

Poetry. Critical Introduction by Jeremiah Webster. Starting with Eliot's infamous The Waste Land, the collection unfolds with some of Eliot's finest early poems, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," and "Preludes" before it takes the reader through a little known short story ("Eeldrop and Appleplex"), an homage to the Metric and Poetry of Ezra Pound, the singularly celebrated "Tradition and the Individual Talent," a reappraisal of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and, at last, an essay on Dante. "Jeremiah Webster's brilliant Introduction leaves no doubt about Eliot's relevance for a new generation of readers."—Lee Oser "Dr. Webster's introduction offers compelling reasons for experienced readers to revisit Eliot, and powerful incentives for new readers to explore the landscape of this immeasurably influential artist."—Dr. E. Victor Bobb