First Published in 2000. Nearly everyone who addresses T. S. Eliot's imaginative and critical work must acknowledge the importance of music in thematic and formal terms. This collection of original essays thoroughly explores this aspect of his work from a number of perspectives.

Collection of essays by 20th century scholars and critics examining all aspects of T.S. Eliot's work.

This edited book is the work of four years where the writers try to present a different study and understanding of some of T. S. Eliots poetry and his unique style of being a modern poet, not exactly like the other modernist poets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. We have found that Eliot, in his poetry and prose writings, was a modernist writer who, unlike other modernist poets, did not accept the way others rejected the values of religion and tradition. Eliot focuses more on the role of religion and tradition in the psychological state of the individual and its impact upon the social stability. His viewpoint regarding the vital role of spirituality in the life of the individual could be clearly seen in his poetic poems and prose writings, but this aspect has been too little or not tackled as it is done with Homer.

These essays were originally published in various periodicals since the first appearance of "The waste land" in 1922 and reflect how each decade reappraises the work. Early critics found the work a reflection of the world war just concluded, filled with despair and emptiness. Later critics found reason to hope amidst the despair, and contemporary critics have returned more to the original assessment. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In his time T.S. Eliot established a new critical orthodoxy by which no major modern critic in England or America remained unaffected, but a decade has passed since his death and a generation or more since his extraordinary influence was at its height. It has therefore seemed worth attempting a fresh historical revaluation of Eliot's critical achievement and the nine distinguished scholars whom Dr Newton-De Molina approached responded readily to his invitation that they undertake such a project. Their essays range widely over the various aspects of Eliot's critical activity and place it in the context not only of his endeavours as poet and dramatist but also of his formal training as a philosopher and of his conversion to Christianity. They contrast the early and later work (not forgetting Eliot's own retrospective comments on the former), consider its relation to the English critical and poetic tradition, and seek to show in what ways criticism may derive new impetus from the example both of Eliot's strengths and of his limitations.

First Published in 2000. Nearly everyone who addresses T. S. Eliot's imaginative and critical work must acknowledge the importance of music in thematic and formal terms. This collection of original essays thoroughly explores this aspect of his work from a number of perspectives.