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.
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