Let Us Go Then, You and I: Selected Poems

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Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against the skyLike a patient etherised upon a table;Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets . . .- The Love Song of J. Alfred PrufrockAs a poet, editor and essayist, T. S. Eliot was the most influential figure of his age, and one of the defining figures of the twentieth century. As well as winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, he was the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, providing the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats, which has been performed all over the world for the past twenty-five years. His poetry is as relevant and revelatory today as it was when first published. This selection, made by Eliot himself, includes many of his most celebrated works, including 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', The Waste Land, and 'The Hollow Men'.

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. He settled in England in 1915 and 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. Three years later he left the bank to become a director of Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber. Eliot was appointed to the Order of Merit in January 1948 and in the Autumn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He married for the second time in 1957, to Valerie Fletcher. He died in January 1965. There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey, beside those toTennyson and Browning.