T. S. Eliot

Craig Raine

Lives and Legacies

Both a brisk biography and a pithy guide to the often difficult verse of Eliot
Devotes attention to the major poetry and the plays: in addition to hallmark works like The Waste Land and the Four Quartets, Raine examines Eliot's career as a dramatist with readings of Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party
Contends with the vexing charges that Eliot was an anti-Semite
Includes a chronology of the poet's life, charting his major achievements and key events in his life

T. S. Eliot

Craig Raine

Description

The twentieth century's most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter, T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult writer-forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic. In this compelling exploration, prize-winning poet Craig Raine finds a way to read and make sense of Eliot's full corpus. He illuminates a paradoxical Eliot—an exacting anti-romantic realist, skeptical of the emotions, yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure—through close readings of his poetry, with extended analyses of Eliot's two master works—The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Raine also examines Eliot's criticism—including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, the auditory imagination, and his biography, crafting a book that provides a concise introduction for beginners and a provocative set of arguments for Eliot admirers.

T. S. Eliot

Craig Raine

Lives and Legacies

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Eliot and the Buried Life
Chapter 1: The Failure to Live
Chapter 2: Eliot as Classicist
Chapter 3: The Waste Land
Chapter 4: Four Quartets
Chapter 5: The Drama
Chapter 6: The Criticism
Appendix 1: Eliot and Anti-Semitism
Appendix 2: Two Free Translations by Craig Raine of 'Lune de Miel' and 'Dans le Restaurant'
Appendix 3: An Eliot Chronology
Notes
Index

T. S. Eliot

Craig Raine

Lives and Legacies

Author Information

Craig Raine

Craig Raine is Fellow and Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, and editor of Arete, a tri-quarterly arts magazine. Poet, literary critic, playwright, librettist, and editor, Raine has been a powerful voice and an adversarial, intellectually independent figure in the literary world for the last 40 years.

T. S. Eliot

Craig Raine

Lives and Legacies

Reviews and Awards

"The book is excellent on the influence on Eliot of Jules Laforge, and has a poet's astute ear for the stray effects of sound and syntax." - Terry Eagleton, Prospect

"The most attractive quality of Raine's mind, in this book, is its vivacity, its enthusiasm, its racy pleasure in turning aside to compare a detail in Eliot with something in Nabokov, Kundera or Lawrence." - Denis Donoghue, London Review of Books

"a fabulous stimulating book, which marries old-fashioned literary criticism to pleasingly off-beam cultural allusions." - Ian Thomson, The Spectator

"This book is an ingenious and convincing demonstration that Eliot is still the Old Possum: lying unassertively low, but anxiously aware that the disinterment of the buried life is an undeniable imperative. But most importantly, it shows perceptively why Eliot's poems work with their unique compulsiveness." - Bernard O'Donoghue, Literary Review

"(Eliot's) existence is in his published work. This explains the strategy of Raine's short monograph - an intensely argued reading of the words on the published page. The exercise is done brilliantly. A poet himself, Raine is hyper alert to nuance. He has a sensitivity to literary echo rivalling that of the greatest living reader of Eliot, Christopher Ricks." - John Sutherland, Financial Times

"There are authors who one would rather read about than read. T.S Eliot is not one of them, yet there is both pleasure and profit to be got from Craig Raine's new study of the poet." - John Bayley, Times Literary Supplement

"Do we need another book about him? The answer, given Craig Raine's T.S. Eliot, is a strong 'Yes'." - Sean O'Brien, Sunday Times (Culture)

"a sensitive, wide-ranging and stimulating piece of literary criticism" - Sunday Telegraph

"This is a thoughtful book on a thorny subject." - John Montague, Irish Times (Dublin)