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Customer Reviews (3)

Magnificent book, poor binding
Recently, the National Review On-Line "corner', carried scornful, ignorant remarks about Eliot by three marginally talented literary hacks: The glib 'popular mathematics" writer, John Derbyshire, whoseliterary reputation rests on a fairly good novel about a Chinese immigrants fascination with Calvin Coolidge, and who is stupid enough to find Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" a great poem, the talented polemicist ( and frankly, tediousStar Trek enthusiast, Jonah Goldberg),and finally, the film critic for the Weekly Standard, who apparently owes his position, not to his rather meager intellectual virtues, or his very limited taste,but to the fact that he is the son of two very gifted neo-conservative publicists. ( What IS his name again? No matter, it' not important.)
Nothing, I think, could better illustrate the vulgarity and decadence of much- not all- but much of contemporary "conservativism" than such dismissals of the greatest Conservative-and Christian- literary figure and intellectual of the twentieth century. This book-which I urge every intelligentyoung conservative to read- is a powerful antidote. ( incidentally, it also reminds us of how intelligent the conservative movement in this country used to be.) It is a humane, generous, beautifully written,and beautifully thoughtout book of great learning, with surprises on virtually every page. Eliot was not without flaws and blindspots, but this book reminds us of the depth of his moral imagination, the acuteness of his mind, and the breadth of his intellectual and human sympathies. READ it..it is the next best thing to reading Eliot himself.
One caveat. The copy I got from Amazon.com has poor binding. The first eight pages actually fell out. the problem is, how do I contact Amazon.com to get a less shoddily bound replacement? I have searched this web-site, and found no place to issue consumer complaints.

Rediscovering Eliot and Kirk
I first read Kirk's book just out of college in the early 1990's. It guided me to more fully understand the worldview, which I had and in which Eliot and Kirk were my guides.I highly recommend this book for all students of modernity and poetry who are beginning to grapple with Eliot and his thought as well as those who are well versed in Eliot.Kirk's prose is one to study as there no one better at the end of the 20th century.Lockerd's "Introduction" intertwines these two men of letters intellectually, spiritually, and uniquely through "philía".As Eliot continues to be studied and sometimes emasculated by critics, Lockerd turns us back to this often forgotten text for it is an original study of Eliot.Russell Kirk examines and properly refutes the political and racist charges made against Eliot today, but Kirk did this in 1971!Readers should be aware that Kirk is not openly defending Eliot, but rather giving a proper examination to his writings, both poetical and cultural critiques as well as Eliot's relationships. Remember to begin to understand a person; one must first look at the friends around him.

Of the Book in Question and the Amiable Goodness Thereof
Upon reading the aforementioned work by the great and amiable Englishman Russel Kirk, I have been forced to come to conclusion that the work is, in general, well-written and, in particular, quite enlightening. Hisexplanations of Eliot's important poetical works are biographically sound,and are given support by cross-references to other prose pieces by Eliothimself (whether from Eliot's own _Criterion_ or some other publication).The fact that Kirk was a friend of Eliot's gives the book great strengthand objectivity. I recommend this book to any who are at all serious intheir study of Eliot. It is a work no true fan of Eliot can do without,humbuggery notwithstanding.

Yours truly,

Andy Younan, Esq. ... Read more

Product Description
This book provides a comprehensive and stimulating introduction to Eliot's poetry for those reading and studying it, perhaps for the first time.The poems--as well as some of the poetic drama and relevant prose criticism--are discussed in detail and placed in relation to the development of Eliot's oeuvre, to his life, and to a wider context of philosophical and religious enquiry. ... Read more

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This reissue of Menand's classic intellectual history of T.S. Eliot and the singular role he played in the rise of literary modernism features an updated Afterword by the author, as well as a detailed critical appraisal of the progression of Eliot's career as a poet and critic. Menand shows how Eliot's early views on literary value and authenticity--and his later repudiation of those views--reflect the profound changes regarding the understanding of literature and its significance that occured in the early part of the twentieth century. The new Afterword was adapted from Menand's critically lauded essay on Eliot in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Seven: Modernism and the New Criticism. ... Read more

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T S Eliot's poetry, although very modest in quantity, remains one of the great artistic triumphs of the English language. In his ironic accounts of adolescent desire in 'The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock' and 'Portrait of a Lady', he performs masculine self-doubt with a pathos and wit that has yet to be surpassed in poem, book or song. But these early poems can seem like mere exercises beside the astonishing achievements of 'Gerontion' and 'The Wasteland', poems which defined a generation and which broke the mould in English verse to allow a symphony of despairing voices to bear witness to the destruction in Europe. ... Read more

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This extraordinary trove of previously unpublished early works includes drafts of poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as well as ribald verse and other youthful curios. “Perhaps the most significant event in Eliot scholarship in the past twenty-five years” (New York Times Book Review). Edited by Christopher Ricks.
Amazon.com Review
Once regarded as the champion of internationalist culture, in recent years T. S. Eliot has been reclassified as a racist, a misogynist, and a fascist. His life has been the subject of numerous critical studies and even one mainstream film, Tom and Viv, which dissected the intimate details of Eliot's marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. With the publication of Inventions of the March Hare, admirers and critics of Eliot will gain new insight into the poet as a young man. The 40 poems contained in this volume were all written between the years 1909 and 1917, a period during which Eliot graduated from Harvard, spent a year in France, studied Buddhism and Sanskrit at Cambridge University, met Ezra pound, and married Vivien.

These poems reveal a great deal about T. S. Eliot, the man and the poet. His borrowings from other poets are often apparent (an older Eliot once declared: "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal"), as are the repressed scatological, sexual, and neurotic impulses that would have been offensive or shocking to readers of his time. The annotations by editor Christopher Ricks add to our understanding of the poems themselves and what they expose about their author's complicated psyche. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Missing Link
It's not Eliot's best work of course, but that's not why I bought it.I ordered this collection to better understand Eliot before he became Eliot.I found a few books of his very early poetry in my local university's library, but nothing for the years between childhood and Prufrock.I think I've gained a little more insight into one of my favorite modern poets.

Eliot's Sketchbook
These are first sketches that prefigure the later and greater work and, as such, they may be useful as an intro to the "Waste Land." Those with no desire to return to that godforsaken place will find these discrete bits more digestible and not lacking in Eliot's uniquely haunting music. Among my favorites are "Interlude in London" and "Oh little voices in the throats of men." For those interested in tracing the voices in Eliot's "echo chamber," there are copious notes detailing his allusions and borrowings.If you are a serious Eliot connoisseur, you will be tickled by his long-lost bawdy verse.

The Quintessential Collection of Lonely Verse
Eliot is known to undergrads and postgrads as the genius poet of "Four Quartets" and "The Wasteland;" a man who wrote some of the greatest and most confusing verse of the twentieth century.While the rewards of exploration into such poems are certainly great, it is perhaps a more human need for emotional comfort.The above, professional reviews focus on the small section of bawdry verse in the work, but the majority of this collection is devoted to the great, early emotional works of Eliot.The only familiar poem to most readers will probably be "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (with a previously unpublished extension) and a more perfect banner work could not have been chosen.The poems are beautiful, concise, imagistic, painful, somber, but most of all lonely.Here in his early years Eliot is not living in an academic world, simply the world--with love, hypocrisy, doubt, joy, and emptiness.To read the greatest poet of our centu! ry describe that which is greatly profound is a privilege, here to read him describe what is simply profound is a gift.I recommend this book over all other collections of Eliot's or anyone else's verse.If you were not one of the 11th graders who discarded Prufrock as a helpless reject, and instead saw him as a deeply lonely individual much like ourselves, this volume is for you.It will touch your life and make you just that much more complete. ... Read more

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In 1922 T.S. Eliot sold his benefactor, John Quinn, a notebook containing about 50 poems, including several sequences written during Eliot's twenties. These poems, many of them previously unpublished, are presented in this book. They are of various kinds and cover a wide range of subjects. ... Read more

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In 1985, twenty years after T.S. Eliot's death, a special number of The Southern Review was published that was devoted entirely to his life and work.This book, with some additions and excisions, make that number available to a wider audience in the year that marks the 100th anniversary of Eliot's birth.The collection combines memoirs and critical pieces by thirty-seven contributors, including a previously unpublished lecture by Eliot himself, to present a collective reevaluation of his life and work.The contributors include A. Walton Litz, Cleanth Brooks, Ronald Bush, Christopher Fry, Sir Alec Guinness, Harry Levin, M.L. Rosenthal, Stanley Sultan, and many others. ... Read more

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A 1920 poem plus Eliot's critical essays on Hamlet, Dante, Blake, Ben Jonson, and the Possibility of a Poetic Drama. ... Read more

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"April is the cruelist month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain."This is the first line of T. S. Eliot's most famous poem, "Wasteland".His next offering, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" repeats, "In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo." The other poems are as haunting, if not as famous. ... Read more