T. S. Eliot

Biographical material accompanies reproductions of T. S. Eliot's original manuscript and notes

The Waste Land, and Other Poems

authoritative text, contexts, criticism

The waste land

And Other Poems

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published over a six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was published with a collection of his early works (1936's Collected Poems 1909–1935). After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, which were written during World War II and the air-raids on Great Britain. They were first published as a series by Faber and Faber in Great Britain between 1940 and 1942 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career (East Coker in September 1940, Burnt Norton in February 1941, The Dry Salvages in September 1941 and Little Gidding in 1942). The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943.

Four Quartets

Collected poems, 1909-1962

The waste land and other poems

Notes Towards a Definition of Culture

Selected Essays

The Waste Land

Murder in the Cathedral

Widely regarded as "The Poem of the Century, "The Waste Land is an "infinitely mysterious poem," which, according to John Xiron Cooper, "is a poem we have learned to handle, but not a poem, we have tamed." It is true that publication of the poem marked a watershed moment in the history of British poetry. Soon after its appearance, first in the inaugural volume of The Criterion (October 1922), a quarterly British literary magazine, founded and edited by Eliot himself, in London, and next in the American publication The Dial in New York (November 1922), the poem came to be regarded as one of the seminal works of modernist poetry, and Eliot as a very important literary figure of the time. Eliot earned the Dial Award of $2,000. It is important to note that The Waste Land has no definite structure. It is a poem that does not have a plot. Nor does it have a beginning nor an end. The poetic fragments mirror the fragmentation of life in the cities of Europe, devastated by World War I. It can be termed as "a heap of broken images," a poem, as asserted by Harold Munro, "a potpourri of descriptions and episodes." Since the poem is based on Tiresias's visions which come to him in spurts, The Waste Land seems to be fragmented or disjointed. The reader is expected to string all these fragments together to derive meaning. The Waste Land is also a multi-voiced poem, it has a multitude of voices, voices spoken in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, German, and Italian. It is also richly allusive and polyvocal. It alludes to several texts such as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, Shakespeare, Buddhism, Hindu Upanishad and others. The mind-boggling allusiveness and profundity of the text just went over the heads of his readers, who were initially baffled by a string of quotations and reference to a variety of sources in multiple languages like Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and Sanskrit. They could hardly grasp Eliot's 'aesthetics' of fragmentation and juxtaposition, which can be taken as an inextricable part of the poem's symbolic significance. The Waste Land is basically a peopled landscape; many characters, several of whom are women, roam around freely in the wasteland. It is interesting to note that "all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias." All these women have their own individual story to narrate, their own voice for people to listen to. Such women like Marie, a niece and confidante of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, Lil, the mother-of-five whose unhappy marriage is discussed by her friend in a London pub, the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, the typist girl, who is "bored and tired," the nymphs, who happened to be the friends of the loitering heirs of city directors vary from each other in terms of their age, class, educational level or socio-economic status. The Waste Land is fragmented into five sections: 'The Burial of the Dead, ' 'A Game of Chess', 'The Fire Sermon, ' 'Death by Water' and 'What the Thunder Said.'

Celebrating One Hundred Years of The Waste Land

The Waste Land and Other Poems

Certain of these poems first appeared in Poetry, Blast, Others, The Little Review, and Art and Letters. Contents: Gerontion; Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar; Sweeney Erect; A Cooking Egg; Le Directeur; Melange adultere de tout; Lune de Miel; The Hippopotamus; Dans le Restaurant; Whispers of Immortality; Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service; Sweeney Among the Nightingales; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; Portrait of a Lady; Preludes; Rhapsody on a Windy Night; Morning at the Window; The Boston Evening Transcript; Aunt Helen; Cousin Nancy; Mr. Apollinax; Hysteria; Conversation Galante; La Figlia Che Pianga.

Edited by Peter Washington

Eliot: Poems

Valerie Eliot

A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound

Waste Land

Collected Plays

Ralph Fiennes

Christianity and Culture

Cats! Some are sane, and some are mad. Some are good, and some are bad... The original Old Possum's illustrations have been restored in this edition. These lovable cat poems were written by T. S. Eliot for his godchildren and inspired the musical Cats!, and features Macavity, Mr Mistofelees and Growltiger!

T. S. Eliot

Books

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