Critical attention to T. S. Eliot's works and career has surged since the early 1990s. Innovative scholarship on philosophy, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in his work, as well as renewed controversy over his politics and prejudices, attests to fresh interest in this modernist icon. At the same time, after one of the most successful runs in history, the curtain finally came down on the London and New York production of Cats (for which Eliot was posthumously awarded a Tony); Inventions of the March Hare, a fascinating collection of early poems that had been lost for decades, was finally published; and Time magazine named Eliot "Poet of the Century". A Companion to T. S. Eliot introduces a new generation of readers and educators to Eliot and covers the full breadth of his literary career. The text explores the powerful forces that shaped Eliot as a writer and thinker, analyzes his body of work, and assesses his oeuvre in a variety of contexts: historical, cultural, social, and intellectual. The result is an analytical portrait of T. S. Eliot observed through contemporary eyes by leading Eliot scholars - providing illuminating insight into a poet, writer, and critic who continues to define the literary landscape of the last century.

David E. Chinitz, Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, is the author of T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003) and Which Sin to Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes (2013). He is currently first vice president of the Modernist Studies Association and past president of the T. S. Eliot Society.

Leseprobe