Works by T. S. Eliot (Book Guide)

Source: Wikipedia. Commentary (works not included). Pages: 38. Chapters: Plays by T. S. Eliot, Poetry by T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Murder in the Cathedral, The Waste Land, Four Quartets, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, Macavity, The Hollow Men, The Family Reunion, Little Gidding, Burnt Norton, East Coker, Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Frontiers of Criticism, The Dry Salvages, The Cocktail Party, The Elder Statesman, Selected Essays, 1917-1932, Growltiger's Last Stand, The Journey of the Magi, Ash Wednesday, Preludes, Gus: The Theatre Cat, Hamlet and His Problems, T. S. Eliot's Ariel poems, Portrait of a Lady, The Confidential Clerk, Bustopher Jones, The Sacred Wood, The Rock. Excerpt: The Waste Land is a 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity -its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures-the poem has become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and (its last line) the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih." Eliot probably worked on what was to become The Waste Land for several years preceding its first publication in 1922. In a letter to New York lawyer and patron of modernism John Quinn dated 9 May 1921, Eliot wrote that he had "a long poem in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish." 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. While walking through a graveyard, they started discussing 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." 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 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