num_pages: 208
description: In this book Bernard Bergonzi traces the unfolding pattern of T. S. Eliot's life, from his childhood in St. Louis and his student days at Harvard to his final years at elder statesman of letters and Nobel prizewinner. The picture of Eliot's complex and frequently surprising personality draws on accounts by the many distinguished writers who knew him, such as Bertrand Russell, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, I. A. Richards, Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, and Virginia Woolf. Professor Bergonzi emphasises the importance of Eliot's American origins and shows how his expatriate status inevitably made him something of an outsider in English society, however closely he identified with it. He also shows how much of Eliot's finest work emerged from a heroic struggle against ill health and intense private suffering. As a study of T. S. Eliot's work this book provides a critical commentary on the poetry and plays, and at the same time discusses the major aspects of Eliot's prose: his writings on religious, political and social criticism. In taking a comprehensive view of Eliot's literary career Professor Bergonzi indicates certain themes that recur throughout the verse, drama and criticism: the interpenetration of past and present, the important of 'timeless moments' in the flux of life, and the burden of privileged individuals. He shows, too, the unusually wide range of influences that Eliot acknowledged, extending from the popular music hall to the poetry of Dante. Although his book is the result of a lifelong admiration of Eliot's achievement, Bernard Bergonzi's approach is not merely expository: he remains throughout critical and discriminating.
language: English
title: T. S. Eliot
titlecomplete: T. S. Eliot (Masters of World Literature)
ratings_count: 16
publisher: Macmillan Company