Book Description
Eliot is the rare case of a great poet who was also an academic philosopher. Donald Childs' study examines the relationship between Elliot's writing of poetry and his philosophical pursuits, in particular his lifelong occupation with the work of F.H. Bradley, Henri Bergson, and William James. This account also considers the reception of Eliot's writing in philosophy and argues that the study of this work has significantly entered recent Eliot criticism. Overall, this volume provides a new reading of Eliot's famous poems, his literary criticism, and social commentary. ... Read more

Book Description
T.S. Elliot (1888-1965). Writings include: Prufrock and other Observations, Poems, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Not your grandfather's T.S. Eliot . . .
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. ... Read more

Book Description
Of the many different kinds of anti-Semite, Eliot was the rarest: one who was able to place his anti-Semitism at the service of his art. Anthony Julius's highly acclaimed study looks both at the detail of Eliot's deployment of anti-Semite discourse and at the role it played in his greater literary undertaking.

Julius begins with an analysis of Eliot's anti-Semitic poems that situates them in their critical context. He then moves to the prose work and an examination of the figure of the "free-thinking Jew." Finally, he considers whether, as has elsewhere been suggested, Eliot's postwar work made amends for this aspect of his earlier writings. Julius's seminal study has provoked a reassessment of Eliot's work among poets, scholars, critics, and readers that will continue to invigorate debate for years to come.

For this second edition, Julius has provided a new preface and postscript responding to the arguments used by friendly and hostile reviewers alike and demonstrating that Eliot's anti-Semitism remains a subject of considerable importance for literary historians and readers of Eliot's poetry alike. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Be sure to check the notes!!!
The dishonest approach used by Julius throughout this book is characterized by the quotation on page xiii that refers to a personal confrontation in South Africa between Eliot and a Mrs. Millen. The confrontation simply never happened. Julius refers to this item several times in the body of the text. He explains the fabrication in a footnote as "at best, a melodramatic and telescoped version of the truth."No, it is a lie. It refers to a meeting that never happened and the quote has not been removed or changed in the revised edition.
When one carefully checks each and every source note (and they are profuse) in analyzing the anti-semitic "quotes" attributed to Eliot by Julius it emerges that the actual sources are not Eliot but snippets from other anti-semitic tracts carefully juxtaposed by Julius to give the impression they are Eliot's. This casts a pall of mendacity of the entire enterprise. These sorts of tactics are unncessary and raise questions of integrity.
The book consists of the intricately wrought polemics of a clever barrister who seeks to give the appearance of a scholarly investigation accompanied by much hand-wringing about being "fair" to Eliot. It would take another dissertation the length of Julius's original to completely debunk many of his specious claims. Don't let the copious notes fool you. Each and every one needs to be checked.
This book, more than any other, has damaged Eliot's stature and reputation. Some young scholar should spend the time necessary to refute it.

Devastating critique of anti- Semitic Eliot
I studied the work of Elliot in graduate school. I knew the Anti- Semitic passages, and thus held myself distant from the cult of Elliot worship. Nonetheless reading Julius' deeper probing into Eliot's Anti-Semitism I am angry at myself for not being more outraged. It turns out that Eliot did not want Jewish readers. He scorned us.
The lines of 'Burbank with a Baedaker, Bleisten with a cigar' and other lines from 'Gerontion' would fit in well with Nazi propaganda.
Apparently Eliot was as Julius points out a 'literary anti- Semite' whose hate and scorn were for the 'free-thinking sceptical Jews' he believed the enemies of Christian civilization. On a personal level he apparently was able to bear Jewish company, here and there.
Julius shows how the Anti- Semitism is not a passing theme of youth but also pervades his later prose work.
I believe that after reading this work it is impossible to read Eliot again without feeling moral repulsion.

T.S. Eliot and the Aesthetics of Anti-Semitism
Anthony Julius has written the most objective and informative work to date on the anti-semitic aesthetics of Eliot's early poetry. Though the author is an admirer of Eliot, he is not the least bit apologetic about his attempts to come to the grips with the literary consequences of an anti-semitic aesthetic. Julius takes a cue from deconstruction when he notes that any attempts to remove or downplay anti-semitic elements in Eliot's poetry will only serve to destroy the thematic body of Eliot's vast literary corpus. Julius also takes aim at the prose works of Eliot, thereby showing that Eliot's anti-semitism was not a phase (as most critics and scholars have argued since the post WWII period); rather, it was an integral poetic topoi. Finally, the author documents T.S. Eliot's association with fellow Anti-semite Ezra Pound and the latter's role in suppressing and expunging the anti-semitic "Dirge" from the finished portion of "The Wasteland." In closing, please believe me when I tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed reading and re-reading this book. I have yet to find anything questionable about the author's research or his methodology. To scholars and students who are interested in the life and writings of T.S. Eliot, I say to all of you: BUY AND READ THIS BOOK! ... Read more

Book Description
While contemporary readers emphasize Eliot's charged personal life-his anti-Semitism, his political conservatism, and his misogyny-Laurie MacDiarmid argues that although Eliot's poetics are shaped by private fears and fantasies, in many ways these are the ghosts of a culture that accepts and celebrates him. Comparing early versions with finished poems, this book explores the development and ramifications of Eliot's "impersonal" poetic and how Eliot conceived an eroticized poetry of worship and a poetic that dictated a sacrificial relationship to a savage God. ... Read more

Book Description
This book demonstrates the effect of politics on the work of T.S. Eliot, with particular emphasis on the influences of French reactionary thinking. Kenneth Asher argues that this political inheritance provided the intellectual framework Eliot employed throughout his career. The focus of this political dimension separates the book from previous studies of Eliot. The result is a reestimation of Eliot's view of literary history and literary theory, and new appraisals of several major poems and plays. ... Read more

Amazon.com Audiobook Review
After sitting through T.S. Eliot's reading of "The Waste Land," listeners may be inclined to hang up the earphones for a spell. There are no flaws to Eliot's steady-toned interpretation; in fact, his delivery is quite remarkable in its ability to match the poem's constant, somber mood. It's just that 25-plus minutes of Eliot's desolate landscapes--rendered even more real by the author's incessant tones--can wear on the emotions.

In addition to the full-length version of "The Waste Land," this recording includes Eliot's stirring narration of "The Hollow Men," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and "Macavity the Mystery Cat." Listen to Eliot read from "The Waste Land." Visit our audio help page for more information. (Running time: 47 minutes, 1 cassette) --Rob McDonald Book Description
While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T. S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot unfolds a nightmarish landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voice (literary, historical, mythic, contemporary) of an unconscious that is at turns deeply personal and culturally collective. This edition includes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Gerontion," and more. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

The Waste Land -- Audio CD-- www.bnpublishing.com
The Waste Land

From the listing this item appears to be a recording of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, read by the poet himself; but it's not, it's a performance by another reader, and therefore it had (to me) no interest; it was not what I wanted or needed.I suggest that the product description should be made clearer, so that other customers do not make the same mistake.

Undead City
T.S. Eliot is a genius. The Wasteland is, by far, the best poem I have ever read. It is a bit difficult to get through, but I'm sure if you are thinking of picking up this book you are not looking for light reading. Also, of all the editions I've read, I think this one is the best. The notes on the reading are helpful and explain the text fairly well.

a good edition of Eliot for the casual reader
I found this edition by Penguin to be very useful for a casual reading.The notes on the poems, in particular "the Waste Land," are detailed enough to give the reader a perception of Eliot's vast literary knowledge and its effect on his poems.However, the notes are inadequate if your purpose is to deeply understand the background of Eliot's complex and difficult poetry.So if you are looking for deep insights, I would recommend the Norton Critical Edition.For the normal reader, this is satisfying and straightforward.

Greatest Poet of the Century
I think perhaps the wasteland has been to long interpeted as a lament, our a lecture, or even a statement about disillusioment. To me it seems to be the story of a non commital spiritualist lingering on the edge Nihilism, confused in pain and feeling empty as if no philosophy has prover satisfactory in his thirst for truth. I have known the morbid and dark mindstates Eliot describes, and I think that is what the wasteland is: a portrait of intense mental and spiritual torment, embellished with symbolism and shifting voices. But that is essentialy what it is, though each voice is distinct it seems to me that the torment of one man leaps between changing but always hinting that they are all his. It is in a way a dramatation of the utimate feelings of man between rationalism and Nihilism and hating both. Feeling that they are frauds and that the only truth is in the empty tired nothingness.

The Life Of Man As A Dubious Experience
This volume includes T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922), and thus provides readers with a fair introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. The American expatriate was a genuine original, bringing forth a new Modernist voice at a time when the movement was at its beginning and Edwardian poetry still carried the day in England.

Clipped, dry, angular, and intellectual if still emotionally sensitive, Eliot's vision of deserted midnight urban streets, ever-present enveloping yellow or brown fog, doubt-obsessed social misfits ("Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?" "Do I dare disturb the universe?"), and city dwellers quietly ensnared in a mundane round of workaday routine had an enormous impact on the cultural scene of the period. If the poet doesn't strictly focus on the ugly, he does focus on the unadorned and mundane detritus of civilization in the immediate: "morning comes to consciousness / of faint stale smells of beer / from the sawdust-trampled streets." He speaks of "grimy scraps" of "newspapers from vacant lots," "broken blinds and chimney-pots," and of "raising dingy shades / in a thousand furnished rooms," as if the inexorable void of outer space was present in the next flat and steadily closing in. Even "the evening" "is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table."

Human consciousness and human nature are hesitant at best and deeply troubled, in any number of ways, at worst: sleep reveals "a thousand sordid images" of which the "soul" is "constituted," and the palms of "both hands" are "soiled."The poet states that "There will be time to murder and create," and 'Sweeney Erect' describes the act of sexual intercourse in desperate, awkward, unfulfilling, and bestial terms. In fact, nature in all its manifestations is largely repugnant to Eliot; 'Sweeney Erect' literally describes female genitalia as the vagina dentata: "This withered root of knots of hair / Slitted below and gashed with eyes / This oval O cropped out with teeth." Nor are the seasons a source of comfort: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire," he says, and suitably, most of the early poems speak only gravely of autumn and winter. The "soft October night" mentioned in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' startles, since the image it conjures slightly betrays traditional associations of comfort and perceived beauty.

During the period in which the poems were written, Eliot was in the throes of a very troubled marriage to the mentally unstable Vivienne Haigh-Wood, which explains much of the revulsion and guilt-ridden despondency expressed. Eliot was projecting and transposing: history has shown that the poet frequently acted without responsibility and integrity towards Vivienne and their severe personal problems, and thus the vengeful Furies that appear among the dramatis personae in a later Eliot drama were real forces in the poet's psyche. Eliot's inability to cope with Vivienne resulted in moral and ethical failures on his part: the real waste land was Eliot's own perception of his life and reaction to it.

But in his later work, Eliot's fervent religious beliefs would blossom to the fore; much of that poetry would be underscored by a starkly expressed belief in Christian salvation and the potential resurrection of the spirit.

Eliot was not an admirer of the Romantic school, and thus his urban landscapes are neither post-Romantic nor decadent environments, but simply sterile cityscapes devoid of any quality that genuinely support the promise inherent in human existence. However, though Eliot decried the solipsism of the Romantics, his own early work is often pinched, parsimonious, and reductive to the point of constriction.

'The Waste Land,' which is accompanied by five dense author-imposed pages of tedious explanatory notes (which ostensibly insure that the reader understands the poem contains dozens of references to the Bible, Ovid, Sappho, St. Augustine, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Frazer, and even Herman Hesse, among others) is particularly obscure, and therefore solipsistic in its own fashion: its intended audience was not the common man on the street by any means, but the clever, educated, well read, and competitive armchair intellectual of the kind that populated the literary circles in which the author then moved. Aptly titled, 'The Waste Land' is a tedious academic game and a triumph not of poetry but of marketing, with multiple lines like "Weialala leia Wallala leialala" and "Co co rico co co rico" that are guaranteed to lock its audience out.

Eliot may have shunned Romanticism, but he never escaped the powerful romantic elements in his own nature; this is apparent right at the beginning of his published work with 1917's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' which famously ends with "the mermaids singing, each to each" and Prufrock observing, "I do not think they will sing to me." "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floor of silent seas" can also be interpreted in terms of romantic, even rebellious, longing: the tone is different from that broadly found in Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, but the desire for unrestricted freedom, even oblivious freedom, is actively present nonetheless.

Even if intended ironically, 'Rhapsody On A Windy Night' is romantically titled, and the later 'Marina' ("What images return...O my daughter"), 'Ash Wednesday' (1930), and 'Four Quartets' would be thoroughly suffused with longing, desire, and sense of loss. In fact, some may interpret Eliot's fervent Protestantism as the final manifestation of this restless trend in his personality.

Since in his early work Eliot's poetry is more satisfying on a line by line basis ("Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin"), a more complete portrait of the poet and his work is available in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909 - 1950 (1971).


... Read more