This Is A Comprehensive Study Of The Whole Æuvre Of T.S. Eliot, His Poetry, Criticism, Drama And Social Writings From The Pen Of A Penetrating Scholar. The Writings Of Eliot Still Form Major Documents Of Twentieth Century English Literature Presenting Challenges And Problems To The Reader. Using The Tools Of 'Background' And 'Domain' Assumptions, The Author Has Brought Out Eliot'S Philosophical Moorings And Sociological Preoccupations. A Study Of This Book Is A Must If Eliot'S Esoteric Doctrines And Poetry Have To Be Seen As A Systematic Whole.

In this fascinating and revealing book, first published in 1952, Maxwell shows the development of Eliot’s poetry and poetic thought in the light of his political and religious attachments. This study traces Eliot’s style from the earliest poems to the Quartets, and examines the characteristics of Eliot’s earlier work adumbrate that of his maturity. The Poetry of T. S. Eliot is essential reading for students of literature.

T. S. Eliot enjoyed a profound relationship with Earth. Criticism of his work does not suggest that this exists in his poetic oeuvre. Writing into this gap, Etienne Terblanche demonstrates that Eliot presents Earth as a process in which humans immerse themselves. The Waste Land and Four Quartets in particular re-locate the modern reader towards mindfulness of Earth’s continuation and one’s radical becoming within that process. But what are the potential implications for ecocriticism? Based on its careful reading of the poems from a new material perspective, this book shows how vital it has become for ecocriticism to be skeptical about the extent of its skepticism, to follow instead the twentieth century’s most important poet who, at the end of searing skepticism, finds affirmation of Earth, art, and real presence.

This study explores the many striking parallels between the poetic theory and practice of T.S. Eliot and that of writers belonging to what is generally regarded as the last expression of nineteenth century romanticism, the "aesthetic movement." The first chapter explores the basic assumptions of that movement, pointing out that, above all else, it was an attempt to establish the independence of art from utilitarian considerations of any kind. The suggestion is also made that this insistence on the autonomy of art was responsible for the preoccupation of the aesthetes with what might be called a subjective kind of poetry, with a poetry offering not an objective description of the external world but a view of reality charged with the subjective feelings and mystical perceptions of the poet. Also examined are some of the techniques developed by the aesthetes to communicate this world of inner experience, techniques such as the use of symbols (ordinary objects given emotional suggestiveness by being evoked rather than named directly), the substitution of a logic of association (characteristic of inner mental processes) for a coherent development of thought, an avoidance of all explanatory rhetoric, and a concentration on achieving an effect of incantation. The second chapter concentrates on Eliot's criticism, noting how he always retained a fundamental belief in the aesthetic doctrine of the autonomy of poetry, but modified it by insisting that unless poetry is considered in relation to the various disciplines upon which it draws its sustenance, it deteriorates into a mere abstraction. This belief in the separate-but- relatedness of poetry is shown, in turn, to have shaped his view that poetry must take into consideration both the subjective and the objective aspects of experience, that it must represent a fusing together of thought (or feeling) and sensation, form and content. That in taking this position Eliot was not rejecting but only modifying aesthetic doctrine is demonstrated in the third chapter which examines the poetry and shows how it continues to exhibit such familiar aesthetic features as a preoccupation with states of feeling, a tendency to avoid discursive rhetoric, a preference for associative patterns of organization, and an emphasis on incantation. What is modified is shown to be mainly the imagery which, being altogether more concrete and substantial than that of aesthetic poetry, made possible the expression of precise rather than generalized emotional states. Only in the later poetry where the emphasis is less on feeling than on ideas is there found to be a significant departure from the aesthetic tradition, a departure evident in such stylistic changes as a greater concentration on rational as opposed to associative forms of organization, a preference for a more intensive allegorical kind of imagery, and a greater use of abstract language.

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.

Although Eliot exerted for many years as important influence on English poets, his writing style & choice of material made his work difficult for the average reader. This study analyzes his poetic theory & discusses a number of his major early works. "The excellence of this little volume makes it a key for easy entrance into Eliot's entire poetic work."--NEW YORK TIMES.