On Poetry and Poets

(Paperback)

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An important collection of T. S. Eliot's literary essays and lectures composed, with one exception, in the 1940s and 1950s. All the material is subsequent to the criticism represented in his standard Selected Essays. In this volume Eliot is concerned solely with individual poets (Virgil, Sir John Davies, Milton, Johnson, Byron, Goethe, Kipling, Yeats) and with the art of poetry.

Author Bio

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. His early poetry was profoundly influenced by the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Laforgue. In his academic studies he specialised in philosophy and logic. His doctoral thesis was on F. H. Bradley. He settled in England in 1915, the year in which he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and also met his contemporary Ezra Pound for the first time. 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. In 1919 Poems was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. His first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, appeared in 1920. His most famous work, The Waste Land, was published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce's Ulysses. The poem was included in the first issue of his jou