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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
As the chief poems in "A Lume Spento" were afterwards incorporated in "Personae," the book demands mention only as a date in the author's history. "Personae," the first book published in London, followed early in 1909. Few poets have undertaken the siege of London with so little backing; few books of verse have ever owed their success so purely to their own merits. Pound came to London a complete stranger, without either literary patronage or financial means. He took "Personae" to Mr. Elkin Mathews, who has the glory of having published Yeats' "Wind Among the Reeds," and the "Books of the Rhymers' Club," in which many of the poets of the '90s, now famous, found a place. ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
Eliot's correspondence from his childhood in St. Louis until he had settled in England and published The Waste Land. Edited and with an Introduction by Valerie Eliot; Index; photographs.
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Customer Reviews (1)

a poet in his prose
No biography of Eliot could better capture the thoughts and personality of the young poet than these letters.Eliot had a lively correspondence with so many, including family, friends, editors, and partners in verse.Eventhe short letters -- like the ones in which Eliot simply announces to hiscorrespondent that he's exhausted and doesn't want to write anything --give a glimpse of how Old Possum acted.

Eliot's poetry is so cerebral andallusive that when reading it, one can feel at his mercy.In his lettershe is far less in control, and the contrast is fascinating. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (5)

Imperfect, but a great help for beginners to Eliot
In A GUIDE TO THE SELECTED POEMS OF T.S. ELIOT the critic B.C. Southam has prepared an ideal guide for students new to T.S. Eliot's poetry. Southam is adamant about seeking to help students who have already been attracted by Eliot's work to form their own appreciation and understanding.

Though I've been a fan of T.S. Eliot for many years, I learned quite a bit from Southam's notes. All four "Ariel Poems" - which are deceptively simple and difficult for students to penetrate - are covered in depth. The often-neglected "Chorus From The Rock" finally gets substantial attention here.

My largest complaint about the work is that it is indeed a guide only to the material which appears in Faber & Faber's SELECTED POEMS. As a result, the extremely tricky and allusive FOUR QUARTETS is not covered (too late), nor is Eliot's early turn at drama "Sweeney Agonistes" (not strictly poetry).

Another problem is that not all of the book has been updated after great discoveries in Eliot studies - such as Valerie Eliot's edition of the manuscript of "The Waste Land". Southam makes some assertions which are clearly informed from the latest evidence, but other material looks as if it has remained unchanged since the book's first edition.

In spite of its flaws, I think Southam's work is a great resource for school and university students who find Eliot sublime but opaque. I'd recommend it to any beginning reader of that great poet's work.

An in-depth guide that is easy to read...
I am a college student who happens to be interested in the Modernist period of literature.I really enjoy T.S. Eliot's poetry, but like many others, agree that reading it can be a tedious and laborious project to undertake.This is what makes it wonderful though, isn't it?Southam's book really gives a reader new perspectives and may even validate thoughts that one may have about "The Waste Land" and other poetry written by Eliot.The way that Southam uses language to give insight into the poetry is really easy to understand and a pleasure to read whether you are interested for academics or pleasure.

Aid to Eliot Comprehension
I am a student, and had to present an explication of T.S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_.This work of Eliot's is entrenched in laborious detail that takes the reader from the text to the footnotes again and again.It becomes quite confusing and a bit irritating at times.This book, _The Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot_, was extremely helpful in that it construes Eliot's use of footnotes, and the allusions made within the work.It helps to clarify the questions lingering in the reader's mind, and allows for a more critical reading of the poem.I found it to be an insightful aid to my presentation, and would recommend it to anyone who desires an indepth study on any of Eliot's work.

Recommended for serious readers
First of all, this is a very difficult and laborious book to read.But it will be a very fulfilling experience for those who are seriously interested in poetry.Reading this book certainly shows us the range of allusionsthat T. S. Eliot used in his compositions.The variety of texts that T. S.Eliot mentions in "The Wasteland" reveals us the depth ofspiritual struggle that the author has went through in order to write thepoem.There are references to the Bible, eastern philosophy, literaturefrom the antiquity to the present.There are also reference to someearlier writings by the author.Reading the commentary has shown me therichness to T. S. Eliot's writings that are otherwise difficult to see. With the careful analysis of "The Waste Land, one sees that it is notsimply about a struggle of modern life, but it encompasses wide range ofphilosophy and literature that are involved in the spiritual struggle onemust face in this modern world.

Perfect for the curious literature student
Basically a book explaining the best known Eliot poems line by line, this is despite the premise no "York Notes" book. It demands attention and dedication of the student, but it is worth the amount of time one putsinto it. It aims at the undergraduate/graduate student (I could be wrong -having English as your second language inhibits you somewhat - so perhapsHigh School students in English-speaking countries could find it usefulalso) who is curious as to what Eliot's poetry "means" and ofwhat material it is comprised... ... Read more

Book Description
Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetrybelonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: "I'd say that mypoetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries inAmerica than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'msure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes fromAmerica." In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, JamesMiller offers the first sustained account of Eliot's early years, showingthat the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America.

Born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, T. S. Eliot grew up along theMississippi River, only a few miles down river from Hannibal, the boyhoodhome of another great American writer, Mark Twain. Miller recounts Eliot'searly years in St. Louis schools and follows him in the summers as hevacationed with his family in their Gloucester, Massachusetts, home perchedon the Atlantic Ocean's edge. In 1905 at the age of seventeen, Eliot leftthe Midwest for what would prove to be a lasting separation--attendingMilton Academy in Massachusetts for one year and then Harvard for nineyears, as an undergraduate and as a graduate student in philosophy. Thefirst time he ventured abroad was 1910, when he spent a crucial yearstudying in Paris and forming a deep friendship with the Frenchman JeanVerdenal. It was not until 1914, when Eliot was 26 years old, that he leftAmerica for England--and found reasons to stay there permanently, becominga British citizen in 1927.

Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot's poetry and his life.Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personalexperience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Millerconvincingly combines a reading of the early work--from his earliest poemsthrough 1922, the year The Waste Land was published--with carefulanalysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot's friendsand acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot's Harvardyears. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot's poetry is filled withreflections 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 amilestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of thepoet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In theprocess, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry ofthe twentieth century. Eliot may have lived most of his life abroad, but hewas and continued to be an American poet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Close-up of an enigmatic young man
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. ... Read more

Book Description
This new addition to the elegant Library of Classic Poets series features selections from one of the best-loved poets of the early twentieth century. Elegantly packaged in a handsome edition with a satin ribbon marker, this volume is the perfect addition to any poetry library. From the prolific T.S. Eliot, a pioneer of modernism, here are his most groundbreaking works, including:

• "The Wasteland"
• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

The strange and haunting visions of T.S Eliot
It took me sometime before I could genuinely come to understand and appreciate his poetry: yet, nevertheless, the writings of American-born, anglocized author T.S Eliot have always held a peculiar fascination for me, and, it seems, for a number of other writers and laypeople as well. From the personal yet somehow universal, melancholy and self-doubting music of "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to the wild, multi-cultural, history spanning visions of urban chaos in "The Wasteland", Eliot's oeuvre is rich in religious, political, and philosophical themes, and played an enormous role in shaping the development of poetry in the twentieth-century (not to mention, on an obviously less signficant level, my own writing). Reading Eliot's serious poetry, however, requires a great deal of analytical prowess and is often a rather depressing experience (particularly in the beautiful "Prufrock"): nevertheless, those with patience will find that it is richly rewarding and can be appreciated on a superificial level simply for the entrancing rhythm of the music and haunting nature of the imagery, which, though informed by a number of sources, including Shakespeare, Dante, and Baudelaire, are written in a voice which is always distinctive and wholly original.

A very good collection of Eliot's poems
If you can only get one book of poems, get this one. It has the most important poems before "Four Quartets". If you want more,get also "Four Quartets" and "Murder in the Cathedral" or, even better,get the collected poems.

Inspiring
I admit I don't know a lot about poetry. For that reason I acknowledge that my review of Eliot's work is written with deference to other reviewers, i.e., I rely on their comments after having read Eliot's work. So this review is somewhat synergistic in that I've taken their comments into account as I offer my own observations.

One of my favorites in this work is from "Choruses From 'The Rock'":

"The Lord who created must wich us to create and employ our creation again in His service.
Which is already His service in creating.
For man is joined spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in man;
Visible and invisible must meet in His temple;
You must not deny the body.
...For the work of creation is never without travail;"

The great Eliot at his greatest
T.S. Eliot is a major figure in 20th century literature for criticism, publishing and poetry. On the critical front he is known for his ýrediscoveryý of the Metaphysical poets Donne and Marvell, his collections of essays ýThe Sacred Woodý and ýThe Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticismý; as a publisher he was a director of Faber and built up a stable of ýmoderný poets such as Auden and Ezra Pound.

It is, however, for his poetry that he will surely last and this collection gives a marvelous selection of his works. The first poem in this collection ýThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrocký is a masterwork with superb imagery and a marvelous sense of humour and irony as it gives us the words of a man who seems much older than Eliot must have been when he wrote it, it was first published while he was in his twenties.

While some of his poetry seems to miss the mark as too dense and perhaps overly constructed others have rich layers of imagery and allusion that reward a little effort and rereading with a sense of large and vivid meaning and depth. ýThe Waste Landý, one of Eliotýs most famous poems and responsible, along with other poems of the period such as ýThe Hollow Mený, in giving Eliot a reputation as one of the ýdisillusionedý modern poets. Eliot denied this, saying he gave ýthe illusion of being disillusioned.ý ýThe Wasteland is four hundred lines long and is quite enigmatic, some scholars have said that it may have been less enigmatic before Ezra Pound helped and convinced Eliot to cut it back from an original 800 lines.

The last major work in this volume is ýThe Four Quartets.ý It is impossible in a short review to summarise the brilliance of these works. Written in the late thirties they are a masterful summation of the concerns of Eliotýs earlier works and a culmination of his examination of his own personal Christianity.

Between these three peaks are many works almost their equal. ýSweeney Agonistesý, ýAsh Wednesdayý, ýThe Hollow Mený, and excerpts from the ýThe Rocký among them.

To conclude this collection is a wonderful summary of the poetic works of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. For a complete overview of Eliot you should read at least one of his plays (ýMurder In The Cathedralý is my favourite) and one of his volumes of critical essays such as the two mentioned earlier. I would recommend this volume to anyone who enjoys poetry, particularly those who enjoy reading poetry over and over again.

Great Introduction to T. S. Eliot
I thought that this book was a great introduction to T. S. Eliot. It contains most of his really famous pieces, including The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, A Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock, and manyothers.If you like it, you might also try "Murder in theCathedral." ... Read more

Book Description
By the time Vivienne Eliot was committed to an asylum for what would be the final nine years of her life, she had been abandoned by her husband T.S. Eliot and shunned by literary London. Yet Vivienne was neither insane nor insignificant. She generously collaborated in her husband’s literary efforts, taking dictation, editing his drafts, and writing articles for his magazine, Criterion. Her distinctive voice can be heard in his poetry. And paradoxically, it was the unhappiness of the Eliots’ marriage that inspired some of the poet’s most distinguished work, from The Family Reunion to The Waste Land.This first biography ever written about Vivienne draws on hundreds of previously unpublished papers, journals and letters to portray a spontaneous, loving, but fragile woman who had an important influence on her husband’s work, as well as a great poet whose behavior was hampered by psychological and sexual impulses he could not fully acknowledge.
Intriguing and provocative, Painted Shadow gracefully rescues Vivienne Eliot from undeserved obscurity, and is indispensable for anyone wishing to understand T.S. Eliot, Vivienne, or the world in which they traveled. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Bangs and Whimpers
700 pages of commonplace minutiae is probably tons more than anyone wants to know about Vivienne Eliot but, even allowing for such proffered particulars as V.E.'s 1934 cockroach problems, the story told by Carole Seymour-Jones is fascininating...and repulsive. If they are ever to pick up The Collected Works again without a shudder, devotees of T. S. Eliot will have to study a juggling denial/avoidance, while those who regard him as little more than a purveyor of era-bogged, clever-dick party pieces, will receive broad permission from this volume to dismissively despise him as an appalling, conniving, cheating, embezzling, slug-under-a-rock. (Of the "Uncollected" works , the less said the better.)


Difficult as it may be to generate sympathy for a person who set up household shrines to Oswald Mosley, Jones leaves us little doubt that Vivienne Eliot was certainly as talented as many another Bloomsburian, disgracefully dealt with--abused--by Eliot and her own family, but simplemindedly, to her captive last, holding out for the theory that Tom was not to blame.


With so much material to deal with, it is not surprising Jones occasionally seems to lose track of precisely what went before (early on she lays it out that TSE at least enabled V's affair with Bertrand Russell, certainly profited by it, possibly connived at it; hundreds of pages later Jones speaks of how hurt Eliot was by her infidelity). Jones' oracular certainty of who-felt-what, who-thought-what, who-did-what-why and her psychological pontificating become irksome to anyone not willing to concede her omniscience.But for a microscopic view of a time-dated literary milieu and its peculiar, self-aggrandizing denizens, and a disturbing look at what intellectual creeps can get up to, this book will reward even the non-trivialists among us. ... Read more

Book Description
An international team of leading T.S. Eliot scholars contribute studies of different facets of the writer's work to build up a carefully coordinated and fully rounded introduction. Five chapters give a complete account of Eliot's poems and plays, while others assess the major aspects of his life and thought. Later chapters place his work in historical perspective. There is a full review of Eliot studies, and a useful chronological outline. Taken as a whole, this Companion comprises an essential handbook for students and readers of T.S. Eliot. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Kindle edition has problems
This is a very informative book, and it is well written.But, the Kindle edition has format problems.The end marks don't link, it is missing chuncks of words on some locations (one page has about 10% of the words are missing) several letters per word are missing so the page reads like having to solve a puzzle. On a different page the text is overwritten by other text.This is not in the part you get as the sample.I don't know how they will let anyone know the issue has been fixed, but I just wanted to apply an FYI.

Good Guide
While nothing compares to actually reading T.S. Eliot, this book is a good introduction for new readers of T.S. Eliot. I would suggest that you read some of his major works first then read this book. ... Read more