T. S. Eliot

Tierra baldía es un largo poema dividido en cinco partes que deja sentir el latir del germen épico; su tema central es la leyenda de un rey que al quedar estéril ve cómo sus tierras también se vuelven infecundas. Es una obra erudita que expresa vivamente su idea de la esterilidad de la sociedad moderna en contraste con las sociedades del pasado y se convirtio en un hito de la modernidad.Cuatro cuartetos, considerada como su mejor obra, expresa un trascendental sentido del tiempo en versos emotivos. Es un libro dificil sin argumento tradicional, donde no pasa nada excepto el tiempo y casi se consigue el imposible equilibro entre conciencia y subsconciencia. Cada uno de sus cuatro capitulos poeticos posee una disposicion que sugiere la de una sonata en sus cinco movimientos. El primer cuarteto abre con una reflexion sobre el tiempo, descarnadamente filosofica, que proclama la solidaridad del pasado, presente y futuro; el segundo una sucesion de imagenes da la medida de la vida que fluye y se destruye, pero que pronto, como el fenix, renace. La vida es un combate perpetuo y un empezar continuo. El tercero inicia con un canto al rio, signo del devenir, el rio que esta en nuestro interior, sometido al tiempo. El cuarto insiste en las ideas de desprendimiento y liberacion; es una recapitulacion de los anteriores e ilumina los problemas y experiencias intensamente conjugados en los cuartetos.

Here, for the first time, is a fully scrutinized text of Eliots 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 Eliots 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. The first volume respects Eliots 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 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.

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 Possums Book of Practical Cats and Murder in the Cathedral.Each year Eliots 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 term culture . . . includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list . . .In this famous essay T. S. Eliot examines the principal uses of the word, and the conditions in which culture itself can flourishSo rich in ideas that it is difficult to select two or three of them for comment . . . it is a natural history of culture.Sunday Times

Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliots career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.

The cat himself knows and will never confess...To celebrate Old Possums 75th anniversary we have commissioned lively new illustrations from Rebecca Ashdown for T.S. Eliots original book of Practical Cats. Featuring Macavity, the Mystery Cat; Mr Mistofelees, the Original Conjuring Cat; Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer and all the gang, this is a must for every childs bookshelf and is a great companion to the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage show.

Obviously something more than a successful play, it is the practical demonstration of a patently conceived theory of dramatic form, and as such of high historical interest.Times Literary SupplementEliot has attempted here something very daring and well worth doing. He has taken the ordinary West End drawing room comedy convention - understatement, upper-class accents and all - and used it as a vehicle for utterly serious ideas.Observer

Each year Eliots presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble. Ted HughesPoet, dramatist, critic and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as The Waste Land and Old Possums Book of Practical Cats.

T. S. Eliots career as a successful stage dramatist gathers pace throughout the fascinating letters of this volume. Following his early experimentation with the dark comedy Sweeney Agonistes (1932), Eliot is invited to write the words of an ambitious scenario sketched out by the producer-director E. Martin Browne (who was to direct all of Eliots plays) for a grand pageant called The Rock (1934). The ensuing applause leads to a commission from the Bishop of Chichester to write a play for the Canterbury Festival, resulting in the quasi-liturgical masterpiece of dramatic writing, Murder in the Cathedral (1935). A huge commercial success, it remains in repertoire after eighty years.Even while absorbed in time-consuming theatre work, Eliot remains untiring in promoting the writers on Fabers ever broadening lists - George Barker, Marianne Moore and Louis MacNeice among them. In addition, Eliot works hard for the Christian Church he has espoused in recent years, serving on committees for the Church Union and the Church Literature Association, and creating at Faber & Faber a book list that embraces works on church history, theology and liturgy. Having separated from his wife Vivien in 1933, he is anxious to avoid running into her; but she refuses to comprehend that her husband has chosen to leave her and stalks him across literary society, leading to his place of work at the offices of Faber & Faber. The correspondence draws in detail upon Viviens letters and diaries to provide a picture of her mental state and way of life - and to help the reader to appreciate her thoughts and feelings.

In the period covered by this richly detailed collection, which brings the poet to the age of forty, T.S. Eliot was to set a new course for his life and work. Forsaking the Unitarianism of his American forebears, he was received into the Church of England and naturalised as a British citizen - a radical and public alteration of the intellectual and spiritual direction of his career.The demands of Eliots professional life as writer and editor became more complex and exacting during these years. The celebrated but financially-pressed periodical he had been editing since 1922 - The Criterion - switched between being a quarterly and a monthly, before being rescued by the fledgling house of Faber & Gwyer. In addition to writing numerous essays and editorials, lectures, reviews, introductions and prefaces, his letters show Eliot involving himself wholeheartedly in the business of his new career as a publisher. His Ariel poems, Journey of the Magi (1927) and A Song for Simeon (1928) established a new manner and vision for the poet of The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. These are also the years in which Eliot published two sections of an exhilaratingly funny, savage, jazz-influenced play-in-verse - Fragment of a Prologue and Fragment of an Agon - which were subsequently brought together as Sweeney Agonistes. In addition, he struggled to translate the remarkable work Anabase, by St.-John Perse, which was to be a signal influence upon his own later poetry.This correspondence with friends and mentors vividly documents all the stages of Eliots personal and artistic transformation during these crucial years, the continuing anxieties of his private life, and the forging of his public reputation.

Volume Two covers the early years of his editorship of The Criterion (the periodical that Eliot launched with Lady Rothermeres backing in 1922), publication of The Hollow Men and the course of Eliots thinking about poetry and poetics after The Waste Land. The correspondence charts Eliots intellectual journey towards conversion to the Anglican faith in 1927, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher, ending with his appointment as a director of the new publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, in late 1925, and the appearance of Poems 1909-1925, Eliots first publication with the house with which he would be associated for the rest of his life. It was partly because of Eliots profoundly influential work as cultural commentator and editor that the correspondence is so prolific and so various, and Volume Two of the Letters fully demonstrates the emerging continuities between poet, essayist, editor and letter-writer.

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 Eliots 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 Eliots 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 Eliots 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 poets working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions. The first volume respects Eliots 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 Possums Book of Practical Cats and his translation of Perses 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

Despairing of his volatile, unstable wife, T. S. Eliot, at 44, resolves to put an end to the torture of his eighteen-year marriage.He breaks free from September 1932 by becoming Norton Lecturer at Harvard. His lectures will be published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). He also delivers the Page-Barbour Lectures at Virginia (After Strange Gods, 1934). At Christmas he visits Emily Hale, to whom he is obviously devoted. He gives talks all over - New York, California, Missouri, Minnesota, Chicago - and the letters describing encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson and Marianne Moore (a real Gillette blade) brim with gossip. High points include the premiere at Vassar College of his comic melodrama Sweeney Agonistes (1932). The year was the happiest I can ever remember in my life . . . successful and amusing.Returning home, he hides out in the country while making known to Vivien his decision to leave her. But he is exasperated when she buries herself in denial: she will not accept a Deed of Separation.The close of 1933 is lifted when Eliot breaks into Show Business. He is commissioned to write a mammoth Pageant: The Rock. This collaborative enterprise will be the proving-ground for the choric triumph of Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

Murder in the Cathedral, written for the Canterbury Festival on 1935, was the first high point on T. S. Eliots dramatic achievement. It remains one of the great plays of the century. Like Greek drama, its theme and form are rooted in religion and ritual purgation and renewal, and it was this return to the earliest sources of drama that brought poetry triumphantly back to the English stage.

Eliot is called upon to become the completely public man. He gives talks, lectures, readings and broadcasts, and even school prize-day addresses. As editor and publisher, his work is unrelenting, commissioning works ranging from Michael Robertss The Modern Mind to Elizabeth Bowens anthology The Faber Book of Modern Stories. Other letters reveal Eliots delight in close friends such as John Hayward, Virginia Woolf and Polly Tandy, and his colleagues Geoffrey Faber and Frank Morley, as well as his growing troupe of godchildren - to whom he despatches many of the verses that will ultimately be gathered up in Old Possums Book of Practical Cats (1939). The volume covers his separation from first wife Vivien, and tells the full story of the decision taken by her brother, following the best available medical advice, to commit her to an asylum - after she had been found wandering in the streets of London. All the while these numerous strands of correspondence are being played out, Eliot struggles to find the time to compose his second play, The Family Reunion (1939), which is finally completed in 1938.

This volume covers the production of Eliots play The Family Reunion; the publication of The Idea of a Christian Society; and the joyous versifying of Old Possums Book of Practical Cats. After exhausting himself through nights of fire-watching in the London wartime blackout, he travels the country, attends meetings of The Moot, delivers talks, and advises a fresh generation of writers including Cyril Connolly, Keith Douglas, Kathleen Raine and Vernon Watkins. Major correspondents include W. H. Auden, George Barker, William Empson, Geoffrey Faber, John Hayward, James Laughlin, Hope Mirrlees, Mervyn Peake, Ezra Pound, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, Tambimuttu, Allen Tate, Michael Tippett, Charles Williams and Virginia Woolf. Four Quartets, Eliots culminating masterpiece, is discussed in detail.

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.

T. S. Eliots last play, drafted originally in 1955 but not completed until three years later. Lord Claverton, an eminent former cabinet minister and banker, is helped to confront his past by the love of his daughter, his Antigone. The dialogue in The Elder Statesman, the love scenes in particular, contain some of Eliots most tender and expressive writing for the theatre. The play was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1958.