Awards
Winner of the 1999 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Criticism
Winner of the 2000 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Critical Studies Award
Synopses & Reviews
Schuchard's critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how Eliot's personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of moral criticism in English literature. The book also erodes conventional attitudes toward Eliot's intellectual and spiritual development, showing how early and consistently his classical and religious sensibility manifests itself in his poetry and criticism. The book examines his reading, his teaching, his bawdy poems, and his life-long attraction to music halls and other modes of popular culture to show the complex relation between intellectual biography and art.
Review
"Beautifully written and exhaustively researched...it is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Eliot." Virginia Quarterly Review
Review
"[A] milestone in Eliot criticism." Christianity and Literature
Review
"The most unique aspect of this excellent work is Schuchard's inclusion of previously unpublished materials." Choice
Review
"[Schuchard] elucidates those moments in which he finds that the life presses with particular insistence upon the poems." The Southern Review
Review
"More than any study of Eliot I know, Schuchard's book helps us to understand the foundations of Eliot's conservatism in his intellectual and emotional development." American Literature