T. S. Eliot

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 Land and Four Quartets. 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.

"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, subtle ways it works its magic on the reader." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Was T. S. Eliot anti-Semitic? Some of us might think he was, to some extent and at a certain time, but it doesn't invalidate his poetry. Raine's book shakes the whole question up much more radically, with a highly original, close reading of controversial passages, and concludes that he wasn't. This is not just a virtuoso performance but an important one."-Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

"[T]his is a fabulously stimulating book, which marries old-fashioned literary criticism to pleasingly off-beam cultural allusions ranging from Sid Vicious to Vladimir Nabokov." --Ian Thomson, The Spectator

Craig Raine is Fellow and Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, and editor of Arete, a tri-quarterly arts magazine. Poet, literary critic, playwright, librettist, and editor, Raine has been a powerful voice and an adversarial, intellectually independent figure in the literary world for the last 40 years.

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