Summary
Best known for his works The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot is one of the most popular 20th-century poets studied in high school and college English classes today. Eliot’s masterful use of classical allusions throughout his works demonstrates the great importance he placed on tradition and its place within literary history. Believing that the fragments of a once-great culture surrounded the modern world through literature, he used his writing to recreate the past through tradition.
Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot explores the life and works of this Nobel Prize–winning writer, with extensive analyses of Eliot’s writing, as well as entries on related topics and relevant people, places, and influences. This accessible volume also provides crucial historical and thematic information, along with illustrations, a bibliography, and cross-references.
Coverage includes:
- A concise but comprehensive biography of Eliot
- Entries on Eliot’s major works, including all of his poems, plays, and major critical essays
- Related people, places, and topics, including friends and literary influences, places where Eliot lived and taught, and publications he wrote for
- Appendixes, including a chronology, a bibliography of Eliot’s works, and a secondary source bibliography.
Specifications
Black-and-white photographs and illustrations. Index. Appendixes. Bibliographies. Cross-references. Chronology.
About the Author(s)
Russell Elliott Murphy is a professor of English and department chair at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is the author of Structure and Meaning: An Introduction to Literature, The Meaning of Byzantium in the Poetry and Prose of W.B. Yeats, and many critical articles on T.S. Eliot. He is also the editor of the Yeats Eliot Review.