T. S. Eliot [Paperback]

The twentieth century's most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter, T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult writer-forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic. In this compelling exploration, prize-winning poet Craig Raine finds a way to read and make sense of Eliot's full corpus. He illuminates a paradoxical Eliot--an exacting anti-romantic realist, skeptical of the emotions, yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure--through close readings of his poetry, with extended analyses of Eliot's two master works--The Waste LandandFourQuartets. Raine also examines Eliot's criticism--including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, the auditory imagination, and his biography, crafting a book that provides a concise introduction for beginners and a provocative set of arguments for Eliot admirers.

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Eliot and the Buried Life
Chapter 1: The Failure to Live
Chapter 2: Eliot as Classicist
Chapter 3: The Waste Land
Chapter 4: Four Quartets
Chapter 5: The Drama
Chapter 6: The Criticism
Appendix 1: Eliot and Anti-Semitism
Appendix 2: Two Free Translations by Craig Raine of 'Lune de Miel' and 'Dans le Restaurant'
Appendix 3: An Eliot Chronology
Notes
Index

Unlike many academic critics who have expended huge amounts of energy on uncovering Eliot's sources, pointing to obscure allusions that might unlock hidden meanings in the verse, Mr. Raine zeros in on the emotional core of the poems, using his own familiarity with Eliot's work to give the lay reader a visceral understanding of how the poet came to articulate his ideas and how those ideas evolved over the years. As a poet himself, Mr. Raine has a practitioner's understanding of language and rhythm and sound, and he uses this knowledge to convey the beauty and power of Eliot's verse, and the myriad, subtl!