Books with author T. S. Eliot

This superb anthology by T. S. Eliot features The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, as well as a selection of other works from the poet's early career. The titular poem is steeped heavily in the Renaissance era literature with which T. S. Eliot was highly appreciative. The monologue is strongly inspired by readings of Dante Alighieri and William Shakespeare, poets whom deeply impacted Eliot during his youth and which he read meticulously. A work whose emotions include longing and regret, we hear Prufrock lament the missed opportunities and morose reflections of mortality which occupy his melancholic mind. For its eclectic embrace of past works in a monologue bursting with emotive depth, Prufrock was lauded as a triumphant work of the Modernist era. T. S. Eliot gained ample fame as a young literary, and would go on to author several other landmark poems throughout his life. Several of the other poems in this edition were previously unpublished when this edition first appeared in 1917. Prufrock itself had famously been published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1915, on the emphatic recommendation of Eliot's fellow literary Ezra Pound. Illustrative of the early style which Eliot sought to perfect, this anthology is a wonderful introduction to the poet, and a valuable reference for those familiar with his life's work.

Eliot's haunting verse play, set in a country house in the north of England, was performed at the Westminster Theatre in London in March 1939, six months before the outbreak of war.'What is wonderful is the marvellous opening out of consciousness, the flowering of meaning, which makes the play an account of a spiritual experience. There are passages of great poetic beauty, and statements which are the fruits of a lifetime devoted to poetry.' Listener

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works—including William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part II, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet, the poetry of seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, and the nineteenth-century French Symbolists. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said "to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment".Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature.