T. S. Eliot

"While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T.S. Eliot finished what would become the definitive poem of the modern condition, and one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, "The Waste Land" is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through...

The last major verse written by Eliot and what Eliot himself considered his finest work, Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision brought out in The Waste Land. Here, in four linked poems, spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. Four Quartets is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest...

This drawing-room comedy is a modern verse play about the search for meaning, in which a psychiatrist is the catalyst for the action. "Eliot really does portray real-seeming characters. He cuts down his poetic effects to the minimum, and then finally rewards us with most beautiful poetry" (Stephen Spender).

One of the twentieth century's great thinkers and writers explores what it means to incorporate Christian values into our worldly lives. Originally delivered in 1939 at Corpus Christi College, these three lectures by the renowned poet and playwright T. S. Eliot address the direction of religious thought toward criticism of political and economic systems. With sincerity and intellectual rigor, the Nobel Prize winner asks whether-and how-it is possible...

Thirty-one of Eliot's most influential critical essays on general literary topics, individual authors, and social and religious themes are edited in their entirety or in substantial extract by the distinguished English scholar-critic.

The story begins with a brief prologue describing how the famous yellow diamond was captured during a military campaign in India by a British officer in 1799. The action moves quickly to 1848 England, where, according to the British officers will, the diamond has been given to one of the soldiers young relatives, Rachel Verinder. Yet only hours after the diamond arrives at the Verinder estate, it disappears. Was it stolen by a relative? A servant?...

"Few novels in our time have received the extraordinary praise accorded Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. Originally published in 1936, it is recognized as one of the works that has changed the climate of the written word. It is the story of Robin Vote and those she destroys-her husband the 'Baron, ' their child Guido, and the two women, Nora and Jenny, who love her; the whole illumined by the fantastic monologues of the renegade doctor, Matthew O'Connor,...

Selection of Ezra Pound's poems and translations, covering his entire writing career from his early lyrics and the translations of Provençal songs to his English version of Sophocles' Trachiniae.