Best Selling Books by T. S. Eliot

Finally, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a textual history that contains not only variants from all known drafts and the many printings but also extended passages amounting to hundreds of lines of compelling verse. -- Amazon

In two highly anticipated volumes, the correspondence of the twentieth century''s eminent man of letters, from youth to early manhood

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Prufrock and Other Observations" by T. S. Eliot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in “The Waste Land.” Here, in four linked poems (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.

The inspiration for the iconic musical Cats, T. S. Eliot''s classic and delightful collection of poetry about cats. These lovable cat poems were written by T. S. Eliot for his godchildren and continue to delight children and adults alike. This collection is a curious and artful homage to felines young and old, merry and fierce, small and unmistakably round. This is the ultimate gift for cat and poetry lovers.

The first volume of the first paperback edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot This two-volume critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s poems establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909–1962, rectifying accidental omissions and errors that have crept in during the century since Eliot’s astonishing debut, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In addition to the masterpieces, The Poems of T. S. Eliot contains the poems of Eliot’s youth, which were rediscovered only decades later; poems that circulated privately during his lifetime; and love poems from his final years, written for his wife, Valerie. Calling upon Eliot’s critical writings as well as his drafts, letters, and other original materials, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the imaginative life of each poem. This first volume respects Eliot’s decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909–1962 as he arranged and issued it shortly before his death. This is followed by poems uncollected but either written for or suitable for publication, and by a new reading text of the drafts of The Waste Land. The second volume opens with the two books of verse of other kinds that Eliot issued: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Anabasis, his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase. Each of these sections is accompanied by its own commentary. Finally, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a comprehensive textual history that contains not only variants from all known drafts and the many printings but also extended passages amounting to hundreds of lines of compelling verse.

As a poet, editor and essayist, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth century poetry. This selection, which was made by Eliot himself, includes many of his most celebrated works, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land.Other volumes in this series: Auden, Betjemen, Plath, Hughes and Yeats.

A collection of T.S. Eliot’s most important poems, including “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” T. S. Eliot is one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century. His unique and innovative evocations of the folly and poetry of humanity helped reshape modern literature, with poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” included here, and most notable, the title poem, “The Waste Land,” his groundbreaking masterpiece of postwar decay and redemption. Since its publication in 1922, “The Waste Land” has become one of the most widely studied modernist texts in English literature. Gathering together many of Eliot''s major early poems, distinguished Harvard scholar and literary critic Helen Vendler presents an invaluable portrait of T. S. Eliot as a young poet and examines the artistry and craft that made him a Nobel laureate and one of the most significant voices in modern verse.

This superb collection of 26 works features the poet''s masterpiece, "The Waste Land"; the complete Prufrock and Other Observations ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "Preludes," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," "Mr. Apollinax," "Morning at the Window," and others); “The Hollow Men”; and the collection Poems ("Gerontion," "The Hippopotamus," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," and more).

The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) is a collection of essays by T.S. Eliot. Although Eliot is primarily recognized as one of the twentieth century’s leading English poets, he was also a prolific and highly influential literary critic. This collection, which includes essays on Algernon Charles Swinburne, Hamlet, William Blake, and Dante, is central to Eliot’s legacy and vision of art. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot sheds light on his vision of the role of poet with respect to tradition. Well-versed in classical poetry, Eliot possessed a dynamic vision of poetic tradition that viewed the working poet as an extension of those who came before. The role of the poet, then, is to innovate while remaining in conversation with poets throughout history, to remain “impersonal” by surrendering oneself to a process involving countless others. In “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot provides a critical reading of Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy arguing that both the play and its main character fail to accomplish the playwright’s true intention. Coining the concept of the “objective correlative,” referring to the expression of emotion through a grouping of things or events, Eliot’s essay is a landmark in literary scholarship central to the formalist movement known as the New Criticism. Concluding with essays on Blake and Dante, important spiritual and formal forebears for Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism is central to T.S. Eliot’s legacy as a leading intellectual and artist of the modern era. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound (1885–1972). It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet (or chapbook) titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish, but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism. The poem''s structure was heavily influenced by Eliot''s extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works—including William Shakespeare''s plays Henry IV Part II, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet, the poetry of seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, and the nineteenth-century French Symbolists. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said "to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment". Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature. Among the most significant works by Eliot''s: "Portrait of a Lady", "Preludes", "Whispers of Immortality", "Gerontion", "The Waste Land", "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday", Ariel Poems", "Journey of the Magi", "A Song for Simeon", "Old Possum''s Book of Practical Cats", "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles", "Gus: The Theatre Cat", "Growltiger''s Last Stand", "The Naming of Cats", "Burnt Norton", "East Coker", "The Dry Salvages", "Little Gidding", "Four Quartets".

T.S. Eliot was an American-born British poet, playwright, and social critic. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock earned Eliot fame as it was considered one of the greatest poems of the Modernist movement. This collection includes the following: POETRY: The Wasteland (a collection of 5 poems) Over 30 other poems SHORT STORY: Eeldrop and Appleplex ESSAYS: Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry The Sacred Wood: (a collection of essays on poetry and criticism)

37 essays in an expanded edition of the author''s major volume of criticism.

The first edition of T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece reappears with a major introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winner Paul Muldoon. The Waste Land is arguably the most important poem of the twentieth century. First published in the United States by Boni & Liveright in 1922, this landmark reissue of the first edition, now back with its original publisher, includes a new introduction by Paul Muldoon, showcasing the poem''s searing power and strange, jarring beauty. With a modernist design that matches the original, this edition allows contemporary readers to experience the poem the way readers would have seen it for the first time. As Muldoon writes, "It''s almost impossible to think of a world in which The Waste Land did not exist. So profound has its influence been not only on twentieth-century poetry but on how we’ve come to view the century as a whole, the poem itself risks being taken for granted." Famously elliptical, wildly allusive, at once transcendent and bleak, The Waste Land defined modernity after the First World War, forever transforming our understanding of ourselves, the broken world we live in, and the literature that was meant to make sense of it. In a voice that is arch, ironic, almost ebullient, and yet world-weary and tragic, T. S. Eliot mixes and remixes, drawing on a cast of ghosts to create a new literature for a new world. In the words of Edmund Wilson, "Eliot…is one of our only authentic poets…[The Waste Land is] one triumph after another."

This critique of modern society argues that culture must be organic, and cannot be planned or imposed. The word culture has been widely and erroneously employed in political, educational, and journalistic contexts. In helping to define a word so greatly misused, T. S. Eliot contradicts many of our popular assumptions about culture, reminding us that it is not the possession of any one class but of a whole society—and yet its preservation may depend on the continuance of a class system, and that a “classless” society may be a society in which culture has ceased to exist. Surveying the post–World War II world, Eliot finds evidence of decay in cultural standards in every department of human activity, and expects the phenomenon to continue. He suggests that culture and religion have a common root—and if one decays, the other may die too. In observing the superpowers of his day and the course of recent history, he reminds us that “the Russians have been the first modern people to practise the political direction of culture consciously, and to attack at every point the culture of any people whom they wish to dominate.” The appendix includes Eliot’s broadcasts to Europe, ending with a plea to preserve the legacy of Greece, Rome, and Israel, and Europe’s legacy throughout the last two thousand years. “Behind the urbanity, the modesty, the mere good manners of Mr. Eliot’s exposition, one cannot mistake the force and significance of what he has to say, or ignore that it constitutes a fundamental attack on most of our assumptions on the subject.” —The Spectator

Certain of these poems first appeared in Poetry, Blast, Others, The Little Review, and Art and Letters. Contents: Gerontion; Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar; Sweeney Erect; A Cooking Egg; Le Directeur; Melange adultere de tout; Lune de Miel; The Hippopotamus; Dans le Restaurant; Whispers of Immortality; Mr. Eliot''s Sunday Morning Service; Sweeney Among the Nightingales; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; Portrait of a Lady; Preludes; Rhapsody on a Windy Night; Morning at the Window; The Boston Evening Transcript; Aunt Helen; Cousin Nancy; Mr. Apollinax; Hysteria; Conversation Galante; La Figlia Che Pianga.

T. S. Eliot''s most famous drama, a retelling of the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury Murder in the Cathedral, written for the Canterbury Festival in 1935, was one of T. S. Eliot’s first dramatic achievements, and it remains one of the great plays of the century. It takes as its subject matter the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, depicting the events that led to his assassination, in his own cathedral church, by the knights of Henry II in 1170. Like Greek drama, the play’s theme and form are rooted in religion, ritual purgation and renewal, and it was this return to the earliest sources of drama that brought poetry triumphantly back to the English stage at the time. "The theatre is enriched by this poetic play of grave beauty and momentous decision." —The New York Times

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was an Anglo-American poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Although considered a seminal modernist poet, he is best known today as the author of the poems used as the basis for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, "Cats." Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. We provide here a compilation of three slim, early volumes of Eliot''s poetry. Among the poems included are two of his most famous works, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," complete with Eliot''s own, somewhat notorious, notes on the latter. This book is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah).

The Poems of T. S. Eliot is the authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets, scrupulously edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. It provides, for the first time, a fully scrutinized text of Eliot''s poems, carefully restoring accidental omissions and removing textual errors that have crept in over the full century in which Eliot has been so frequently printed and reprinted. The edition also presents many poems from Eliot''s youth which were published only decades later, as well as others that saw only private circulation in his lifetime, of which dozens are collected for the first time. To accompany Eliot''s poems, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the creative activity that came to constitute each poem, calling upon drafts, correspondence and other original materials to provide a vivid account of the poet''s working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions. The first volume respects Eliot''s decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909-1962 in the form in which he issued it, shortly before his death fifty years ago. There follow in this first volume the uncollected poems from his youth that he had chosen to publish, along with such other poems as could be considered suitable for publication. The second volume opens with the two books of poems of other kinds that he issued, Old Possum''s Book of Practical Cats and his translation of Perse''s Anabase, moving then to verses privately circulated as informal or improper or clubmanlike. Each of these sections is accompanied by its respective commentary, and then, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a comprehensive textual history recording variants both manuscript and published. The Poems of T. S. Eliot is a work of enlightening scholarship that will delight and inform all those who read Eliot for pleasure, as well as all those who read with pleasure and for study. Here are a new accuracy and an unparalleled insight into the marvels and landmarks from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land through to Four Quartets

The Nobel Prize–winning author created the words for this unique play about religion in the twentieth century. The choruses in this pageant play represent a new verse experiment on Mr. Eliot’s part; and taken together make a sequence of verses about twice the length of “The Waste Land.” Mr. Eliot has written the words; the scenario and design of the play were provided by a collaborator, and the purpose was to provide a pageant of the Church of England for presentation on a particular occasion. The action turns upon the efforts and difficulties of a group of London masons in building a church. Incidentally, a number of historical scenes, illustrative of church-building, are introduced. The play, enthusiastically greeted, was first presented in England, at Sadler’s Wells; the production included much pageantry, mimetic action, and ballet, with music by Dr. Martin Shaw. Immediately after the production of this play in England, Francis Birrell wrote in The New Statesman: “The magnificent verse, the crashing Hebraic choruses which Mr. Eliot has written had best be studied in the book. The Rock is certainly one of the most interesting artistic experiments to be given in recent times.” The Times Literary Supplement also spoke with high praise: “The choruses exceed in length any of his previous poetry; and on the stage they prove the most vital part of the performance. They combine the sweep of psalmody with the exact employment of colloquial words. They are lightly written, as though whispered to the paper, yet are forcible to enunciate . . . . There is exhibited here a command of novel and musical dramatic speech which, considered alone, is an exceptional achievement.”

The early works that established Eliot as a modern master

Poet, dramatist, critic and editor, T. S. Eliot 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 the 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. ''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

The collected dramatic works of the Nobel Prize winner, from Murder in the Cathedral to The Elder Statesman. T. S. Eliot’s plays—Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party (which won a Tony Award for its Broadway production), The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman—are brought together for the first time in this volume. They summarize the Nobel Prize winner’s achievements in restoring dramatic verse to the English and American stages, an effort of great significance both for the theater and for the development of Eliot’s art. Between 1935, when Murder in the Cathedral was first produced at the Canterbury Festival, and 1958, when The Elder Statesman opened at the Edinburgh Festival prior to engagements in London and New York, Eliot had given three other plays to the theater. His paramount concerns can be traced through all five works. They have been said to be closely related, marking stages in the development of a new and individual form of drama, in which the poet worked out his intention “to take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process that would leave it a form of art.” What Mark Van Doren said, in reviewing Murder in the Cathedral, is true of all these plays: “Mr. Eliot adapts himself to the stage with dignity, simplicity, and skill.”

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry" by T. S. Eliot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih." Eliot''s poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. Because of this, critics and scholars regard the poem as obscure. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. The poem''s structure is divided into five sections. The first section, "The Burial of the Dead," introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, "A Game of Chess," employs vignettes of several characters-alternating narrations-that address those themes experientially. "The Fire Sermon," the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions. After a fourth section, "Death by Water," which includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, "What the Thunder Said," concludes with an image of judgment. Eliot probably worked on the text that became The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. In a May 1921 letter to New York lawyer and patron of modernism John Quinn, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish."[5] Richard Aldington, in his memoirs, relates that "a year or so" before Eliot read him the manuscript draft of The Waste Land in London, Eliot visited him in the country.[6] While walking through a graveyard, they discussed Thomas Gray''s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Aldington writes: "I was surprised to find that Eliot admired something so popular, and then went on to say that if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem he might achieve a similar success."[6] Eliot, having been diagnosed with some form of nervous disorder, had been recommended rest, and applied for three months'' leave from the bank where he was employed; the reason stated on his staff card was "nervous breakdown." He and his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, travelled to the coastal resort of Margate, Kent, for a period of convalescence. While there, Eliot worked on the poem, and possibly showed an early version to Ezra Pound when, after a brief return to London, the Eliots travelled to Paris in November 1921 and stayed with him. Eliot was en route to Lausanne, Switzerland, for treatment by Doctor Roger Vittoz, who had been recommended to him by Ottoline Morrell; Vivienne was to stay at a sanatorium just outside Paris. In Hotel Ste. Luce (where Hotel Elite stands since 1938) in Lausanne, Eliot produced a 19-page version of the poem.[7] He returned from Lausanne in early January 1922. Pound then made detailed editorial comments and significant cuts to the manuscript. Eliot later dedicated the poem to Pound.

T. S. Eliot was not only one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century—he was also one of the most acute writers on his craft. In On Poetry and Poets, which was first published in 1957, Eliot explores the different forms and purposes of poetry in essays such as "The Three Voices of Poetry," "Poetry and Drama," and "What Is Minor Poetry?" as well as the works of individual poets, including Virgil, Milton, Byron, Goethe, and Yeats. As he writes in "The Music of Poetry," "We must expect a time to come when poetry will have again to be recalled to speech. The same problems arise, and always in new forms; and poetry has always before it . . . an ‘endless adventure.''"

This Dover edition, first published in 1998, is an unabridged republication of poems from early standard editions.