The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot

Description

Poet, dramatist, critic and editor, T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of The Complete Poems and Plays, published for the first time in paperback, includes all of his verse and work for stage, from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as The Waste Land, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and Murder in the Cathedral.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888. He was educated at Harvard, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at Merton College, Oxford. His early poetry was profoundly influenced by the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Laforgue. In his academic studies he specialised in philosophy and logic. His doctoral thesis was on F. H. Bradley. He settled in England in 1915, the year in which he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and also met his contemporary Ezra Pound for the first time. After teaching for a year or so he joined Lloyds Bank in the City of London in 1917, the year in which he published his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations. In 1919 Poems was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. His first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, appeared in 1920. His most famous work, The Waste Land, was published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce's Ulysses. The poem was included in the first issue of his jou

"'Each year Eliot's presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble.' Ted Hughes"