T. S. Eliot

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

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.

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)