Eliot, T.S. Books

101 Great American Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T S. Eliot, Marianne Moore

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Quite a Bang for Your Buck!.......... 4 out of 5 stars.
23 of 23 people found this review helpful.

............this small book of poetry contains the work of nearly forty of the best known American poets. From Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman to Edgar Allan Poe to Robert Frost, there are poems in this collection that are sure to appeal to everyone! Also represented in this collection are ten women poets and eight African Americans including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes and Phyllis Wheatley. There's even a poem by Abraham Lincoln that reveals his thoughts about his childhood experiences.

This collection is a simple, inexpensive way to introduce oneself to the wonderful world of American poetry. Each poet is introduced with a short biography followed by his or her most memorable work. Great buy!

Editorial Review:

Rich treasury of verse from the 19th and 20th centuries, selected for popularity and literary quality, includes Poe's "The Raven," Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," as well as poems by Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, many other notables.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated Edition

T. S. Eliot

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 58 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

It's about cats, cats, and more Cats. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I had read this book before and loved it, but when I met Boris, a real, live version of Rum Tum Tugger, I had to buy a copy to show his owner.
It is amazing how little had to be done to turn these poems into a great musical comedy. I am, of course, talking about Cats. Most of the poems went directly into the show without any change whatever in their wording, and only three songs were added. Let's give full credit to Mr. Webber, It took a musical genius to do that, and one of the added songs, Memories, could stand alone as a masterpiece in any company, but most of the delight of the show comes from the wonderful feline characters created in this book.
Jennyanydots, Old Deuteronomy, Gus the theatre cat, Spindleshanks, Bustipher Brown, McCavity, Mr. Mistofflees, Mungo Jerry, and Rumpleteaser all moved effortlessly from page to stage with no changes. That has to be some sort of record. If you loved Cats (the show) you need to read this book. If you love cats (the critters) you'll want to read this book. If you like poetry, you should read this book. If you like dogs, read the battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles. (You can skip over the part about the intervention of the great rumpus cat.)
It was written for his godchildren, but it's a great read for everyone. It's not expensive, so get it to read to your children, but read it for yourself first.

Editorial Review:

Eliot’s famous collection of nonsense verse about cats-the inspiration for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats. This edition features pen-and-ink drolleries by Edward Gorey throughout.

Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (The Centenary Edition)

T. S. Eliot

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Truly, one of the giants 5 out of 5 stars.
27 of 31 people found this review helpful.

When you think of the best poets ever, T.S. Eliot is one of those that comes to mind. His work is well crafted, intelligent, beautifully written, and has a flow to it that few poets can match. And this is a fine collection for the Eliot lover or for the reader unfamiliar with Eliot. It's divided into several sections. The first section is his Prufrock section, poems from 1917, which contains probably his finest poems: "Prufrock", "Preludes" "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", "Hysteria", among others. Then there is the Poems 1920 section which also contains many fine poems ("Sweeney Erect" and "The Hippopotamus" being my favorites). Then follows his masterpiece The Wasteland. Then The Hollow Men which is followed by the wonderful Ash Wednesday. Then the Ariel Poems (which contains "Journey of the Magi"). Then there are two unfinished poems, "Sweeney Agonistes" and "Coriolan" which I thought were weak. Maybe they would have been great had he ever finished them. Then there is a section called minor poems followed by the mediocre "Choruses from 'The Rock.' And then there is what I consider to be his true masterpiece, "Four Quartets." And the book finishes with some occasional verses, one of which is a sweet and touching poem to his wife. This is a great collection of poems.

Editorial Review:

Published two years before his death, this collection includes all of Eliot’s poetry that he wished to preserve.

Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

All art ... approaches the condition of music. 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Among all these reviews, not one comes to terms with the very title of this opus: Four Quartets. When was Eliot anything but precise in his choice of word?

The inspiration for these poems -- or reflections -- are the late string quartets of Beethoven, those numbered from 12 through 16. It is the 5-movement No.15 in A Minor,Op.132, that seems to have exerted the strongest influence, with it's famous adagio movement, which Beethoven inscribed as the thanksgiving song of a convalescent.

Actually, No.15 was the 13th in order, but the Quartets were published out of sequence, which was not uncommon in Beethoven's time. The Late Quartets progress from the classic 4-movement No.12 and add a movement to each work up to the 7-movement Op.131 in C-sharp Minor. The 16th and final quartet returns to the classic 4-movement form. There is an expansion of form concluding with a contraction and return over the course of 5 works.

Like Eliot's Four Quartets, Beethoven's Late Quartets reflect upon time and faith -- and the 'speech' is often plain: repeated phrases that appear stuck in a groove, hammered chords, cheap tunes that seem to be lifted from a band in a local inn; from long-breathed melodies that look beyond what Wagner and Mahler will eventually bring to music, to cell-like motivs not heard again till Bartok and Webern.

The 'learned' aspect of Eliot's verse can lead us astray, so that we are forever parsing the meaning of the lines. I am taken with the sounds he makes as I read the poems aloud, and the sounds he chose to convey what the poems mean are, in a sense, the essence of meaning. From the first I was struck by the sheer sound of 'time' in the context of these Quartets, which are Eliot's swan song.

Editorial Review:

The last major verse written by the Nobel laureate, including “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding.”

The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions)

T. S. Eliot

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The text of Eliot's 1922 masterpiece is accompanied by thorough explanatory annotations as well as by Eliot's own knotty notes, some of which require annotation themselves. For ease of reading, this Norton Critical Edition presents The Waste Landas it first appeared in the American edition (Boni & Liveright), with Eliot's notes at the end. Contexts provides readers with invaluable materials on The Waste Land's sources, composition, and publication history. Criticism traces the poem's reception with twenty-five reviews and essays, from first reactions through the end of the twentieth century. Included are reviews published in the Times Literary Supplement, along with selections by Virginia Woolf, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, Conrad Aiken, Charles Powell, Gorham Munson, Malcolm Cowley, Ralph Ellison, John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, Delmore Schwartz, Denis Donoghue, Robert Langbaum, Marianne Thormählen, A. D. Moody, Ronald Bush, Maud Ellman, Christine Froula, and Tim Armstrong. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehenive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

Complete Poems and Plays,: 1909-1950

T. S. Eliot

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Still Point of the Turning World 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I'm not at all rating this book five stars; that's my rating for T.S. Eliot's plays. This book was the typical library edition and has everything wrong with it: the cover of an old, wise Eliot (why not a young maverick one?), "Complete" in the title when it's not at all complete, big, heavy, hardback and way too literary looking for the passing reader to crack the cover.

But look how much T.S. Eliot you already know. The Wasteland may be a maddingly obscure poem sequence built around a book by Jessie Weston, but Pete Townshend used the idea in a song: "Teenage Wasteland." You know from another song that T.S. Eliot, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" said that life was measured out in coffee spoons. We all know that Old Possum's Book of Practical...plays out dramatically in a musical titled for the last word of that book...Cats. You could have tackled (or rather relaxed with) his most famous poem sequence, Four Quartets and the accompanying readers' guide by Thomas Howard.

But for all those bits of poetic imagery, you still might not stumble on the plays. I've never seen one of Eliot's plays put on, but they make wonderful reading. As an astute reviewer suggested, don't get this volume, which leaves out two of the five plays (or six if you include "Choruses from the Rock," which is not among the best). That reviewer also provided the helpful advice to track down the Faber edition which really does have all the plays. Some of them, notably Murder in the Cathedral, are available in single editions. But don't miss The Confidential Clerk, The Cocktail Party and The Elder Statesman for a great reading experience.

The only other play I know that reads this well is J. M. Barrie's original play of Peter Pan. Murder in the Cathedral is notable because it falls in the Church of England (Anglican) tradition of putting on plays at the Canterbury Festival. Charles Williams also wrote plays related to this event (Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury), as did Dorothy L. Sayers (The Zeal of Thy House, The Devil to Pay). All of which is to say that there is a lot of great dramatic writing to be rediscovered as reading as well as performance (see also my review of Christopher Fry's plays A Phoenix Too Frequent and The Lady's Not for Burning). Many Sayers readers are also aware that she wrote the first radio play for the BBC on the life of Jesus (and updated it to common language), as well as essays on her experience dealing with the Gospel accounts in dramatic form. The best known of these is "The Dogma is the Drama," available in various collections.

Editorial Review:

This omnibus collection includes all of the author’s early poetry as well as the Four Quartets, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and the plays Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.

The Waste Land and Other Poems (Dodo Press)

T. S. Eliot

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a good edition of Eliot for the casual reader 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

I found this edition by Penguin to be very useful for a casual reading. The notes on the poems, in particular "the Waste Land," are detailed enough to give the reader a perception of Eliot's vast literary knowledge and its effect on his poems. However, the notes are inadequate if your purpose is to deeply understand the background of Eliot's complex and difficult poetry. So if you are looking for deep insights, I would recommend the Norton Critical Edition. For the normal reader, this is satisfying and straightforward.

The Life Of Man As A Dubious Experience 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This volume includes T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922), and thus provides readers with a fair introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. The American expatriate was a genuine original, bringing forth a new Modernist voice at a time when the movement was at its beginning and Edwardian poetry still carried the day in England.

Clipped, dry, angular, and intellectual if still emotionally sensitive, Eliot's vision of deserted midnight urban streets, ever-present enveloping yellow or brown fog, doubt-obsessed social misfits ("Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?" "Do I dare disturb the universe?"), and city dwellers quietly ensnared in a mundane round of workaday routine had an enormous impact on the cultural scene of the period. If the poet doesn't strictly focus on the ugly, he does focus on the unadorned and mundane detritus of civilization in the immediate: "morning comes to consciousness / of faint stale smells of beer / from the sawdust-trampled streets." He speaks of "grimy scraps" of "newspapers from vacant lots," "broken blinds and chimney-pots," and of "raising dingy shades / in a thousand furnished rooms," as if the inexorable void of outer space was present in the next flat and steadily closing in. Even "the evening" "is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table."

Human consciousness and human nature are hesitant at best and deeply troubled, in any number of ways, at worst: sleep reveals "a thousand sordid images" of which the "soul" is "constituted," and the palms of "both hands" are "soiled." The poet states that "There will be time to murder and create," and 'Sweeney Erect' describes the act of sexual intercourse in desperate, awkward, unfulfilling, and bestial terms. In fact, nature in all its manifestations is largely repugnant to Eliot; 'Sweeney Erect' literally describes female genitalia as the vagina dentata: "This withered root of knots of hair / Slitted below and gashed with eyes / This oval O cropped out with teeth." Nor are the seasons a source of comfort: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire," he says, and suitably, most of the early poems speak only gravely of autumn and winter. The "soft October night" mentioned in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' startles, since the image it conjures slightly betrays traditional associations of comfort and perceived beauty.

During the period in which the poems were written, Eliot was in the throes of a very troubled marriage to the mentally unstable Vivienne Haigh-Wood, which explains much of the revulsion and guilt-ridden despondency expressed. Eliot was projecting and transposing: history has shown that the poet frequently acted without responsibility and integrity towards Vivienne and their severe personal problems, and thus the vengeful Furies that appear among the dramatis personae in a later Eliot drama were real forces in the poet's psyche. Eliot's inability to cope with Vivienne resulted in moral and ethical failures on his part: the real waste land was Eliot's own perception of his life and reaction to it.

But in his later work, Eliot's fervent religious beliefs would blossom to the fore; much of that poetry would be underscored by a starkly expressed belief in Christian salvation and the potential resurrection of the spirit.

Eliot was not an admirer of the Romantic school, and thus his urban landscapes are neither post-Romantic nor decadent environments, but simply sterile cityscapes devoid of any quality that genuinely support the promise inherent in human existence. However, though Eliot decried the solipsism of the Romantics, his own early work is often pinched, parsimonious, and reductive to the point of constriction.

'The Waste Land,' which is accompanied by five dense author-imposed pages of tedious explanatory notes (which ostensibly insure that the reader understands the poem contains dozens of references to the Bible, Ovid, Sappho, St. Augustine, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Frazer, and even Herman Hesse, among others) is particularly obscure, and therefore solipsistic in its own fashion: its intended audience was not the common man on the street by any means, but the clever, educated, well read, and competitive armchair intellectual of the kind that populated the literary circles in which the author then moved. Aptly titled, 'The Waste Land' is a tedious academic game and a triumph not of poetry but of marketing, with multiple lines like "Weialala leia Wallala leialala" and "Co co rico co co rico" that are guaranteed to lock its audience out.

Eliot may have shunned Romanticism, but he never escaped the powerful romantic elements in his own nature; this is apparent right at the beginning of his published work with 1917's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' which famously ends with "the mermaids singing, each to each" and Prufrock observing, "I do not think they will sing to me." "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floor of silent seas" can also be interpreted in terms of romantic, even rebellious, longing: the tone is different from that broadly found in Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, but the desire for unrestricted freedom, even oblivious freedom, is actively present nonetheless.

Even if intended ironically, 'Rhapsody On A Windy Night' is romantically titled, and the later 'Marina' ("What images return...O my daughter"), 'Ash Wednesday' (1930), and 'Four Quartets' would be thoroughly suffused with longing, desire, and sense of loss. In fact, some may interpret Eliot's fervent Protestantism as the final manifestation of this restless trend in his personality.

Since in his early work Eliot's poetry is more satisfying on a line by line basis ("Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin"), a more complete portrait of the poet and his work is available in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909 - 1950 (1971).

Editorial Review:

A selection of some of the classic poems considered a major achievement in twentieth century modernist poetry. Includes the masterpieces "The Wasteland", "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady". By Thomas Stearns Eliot - a poet, dramatist and literary critic who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

The Waste Land and Other Writings (Modern Library Classics)

T.S. Eliot

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression."

As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.

In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience.

Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (Sapientia Classics)

Thomas Howard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Throughout the world, many consider T.S. Eliot to be the most important and influential poet of the 20th century, and Four Quartets to be his finest poem and greatest literary achievement. Dove Descending is a journey into the beauties and depths of Eliot's masterpiece written by Thomas Howard, bestselling author, professor and critic. In this line-by-line commentary, Howard unravels the complexities of the sublime poem with such adept adroitness that even its most difficult passages spring to life. During his many years as a professor of English and Literature, Howard taught this poem often, and developed what he calls "a reading" approach to its concepts that render their meaning more lucid for the reader. Dove Descending reunites the brilliant insights of a master teacher whose understanding and love of Eliot’s writings are shared here for the great benefit of the reader. "T.S. Eliot's greatest poem deserves the finest exposition. Few critics alive today are equal to the task. Thomas Howard is one of those gifted few. Lovers of Eliot will delight in Howard's understanding of the mysterious descending of the dove."

—Joseph Pearce

Author, Literary Converts

Voice of the Poet: T.S. Eliot (Voice of the Poet)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

You can hear The Waste Land as it was meant to be heard. T. S. Eliot's reading made the poem come alive. Be warned. Not all of the CD is high quality recordings. Some have background noise. Some are low quality. I don't think the tracks are listed anywhere, so I'll list them for you.

1. La Figlia Che Piange
2. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
3. Gerontion
4. Sweeney Among the Nightingales
5. The Waste Land
6. The Hollow Men
7. The Journey of the Magi
8. Ash-Wednesday
9. East Coker

This is worth it for The Wate Land alone. The rest is just icing on the cake.

Just a wonderful experience. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

It is a great experience to hear the voice of this master poet.

Reading the peoms the way they were meant to be read. 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This audio CD is a must-have for all fans of T. S. Eliot. Poetry is supposed to be read out loud; it is a pleasure and privilege to hear one of the greatest poets of the 20th century read his poems out loud, allowing us to hear the lines the way they were meant to be heard--and read.

This collection contains a short book with an introduction by J. D. McClatchy and the text of all the poem found on the audio CD. The CD contains 9 tracks: La Figlia Che Piange, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, The Journey of the Magi, Ash-Wednesday, and East Coker. The poems are arranged in chronological order, offering insights into the development of both language and themes throughout Eliot's career.

The first track, "La Figlia Che Piange," is one of Eliot's earliest poems and explores, like much of his earlier poetry, the frustrations of a young man and thwarted love. It is a lovely short poem, full of the images that Eliot is well known for. Published at the same time (in the same volume in fact) was also "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." One of the most well known poems, "The Love Song" is a culmination of Eliot's early poetry.

The highlight of the CD is the reading of "The Waste Land." The epic poem is the longest found in this collection, going over 25 minutes. "The Waste Land" by far is one of my personal favorites and I have read it countless of time. However, reading the poem along with this CD has allowed me to shed new meaning to this enormously difficult and marvelous poem. Eliot dramatizes his reading, allowing the dozens of narratives and narrators to come through. Spinning a multifaceted account of the deterioration of society in the early 20th century, a collage of the decay of love and fidelity, a haunting vision of the death of man and his rebirth; all shifting through time and space, drawing upon different histories and languages and cultures, all coalesced through the eyes of Tiresias. Indeed, "a heap of broken images."

"The Hollow Men" is the worst quality recording found on this CD. However it is still evocative as ever. Eliot's hypnotizing monotone, which prevails much of his readings, is exetremely effective in this case, bringing to life the hopelessness and stagnation of the hollow men.

"The Journey of the Magi" is a particularly fitting poem for December and the holiday season. It marks a progression of Eliot's poetry to more theological themes yet still picks on Eliot's fascination with death and rebirth, ending and beginnings.

"East Coker" is the second highlight of the CD. It is the last track and also one of the last poems Eliot composed before his death in 1965. "East Coker" is the second volume in his masterpiece "The Four Quartets." The poem draws upon Eliot's study into Christianity, philosophy, and mysticism. It is a deep exploration of the meaning of time and change. The poem is almost 15 minutes on the CD. Eliot's reading highlights his supreme command of the English language, his sophistication in diction, rhythm and meter. The first and last of the "East Coker" is engraved on Eliot's grave site in England as his chosen epitaph: in my beginning is my end, in my end is my beginning.

This is a well chosen collection of poems which highlights the body of Eliot's work. Hearing the poems being read by their author is a valuable experience. I definitely recommend this to anyone who reads Eliot and would like to learn more about his poetry.

Editorial Review:

Featuring rare archival recordings of the featured poet reading his own work! Each program in Random House Audio Voices' exclusive THE VOICE OF THE POET series is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.