The Poems of T. S. Eliot

These volumes are not merely a monument to T. S. Eliot, they are a blazing demonstration of what literary criticism, at its best, can do for literature. – John Sutherland Financial Times Monumental… In taking apart Eliot’s poems to show where the parts came from, The Poems of T. S. Eliot: The Annotated Text demonstrates that it never was the parts which mattered, but the elusive magic which made up the whole machine. Times Literary Supplement … So comprehensive and authoritative that one can’t imagine their [the editors’ notes and commentaries] being superseded… Times Literary Supplement … One of the great achievements in the literary scholarship of our time. Times Literary Supplement These volumes force a reevaluation of the highs and lows of Eliot’s gifts, one that will supersede earlier, outmoded interpretations of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexual inhibition and avowals of elitist or conservative slants… Essential. Choice Two all-comprehending new tomes… utterly authoritative. London Review of Books

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965. Christopher Ricks is the co-director, with Archie Burnett, of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. His publications on Eliot include T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988), Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (1996), and Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot (the Panizzi Lectures, 2002), together with True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (2007). Jim McCue is the author of Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (1997) and the editor of the Penguin Selected Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough (1991). For fifteen years he worked for The Times, where he wrote the Bibliomane column. His imprint, the Foundling Press, began with the first separate publication of T. S. Eliot’s Eeldrop and Appleplex and has printed for the first time writings by Alexander Pope, Ben Jonson, Henry James, and A. E. Housman.