Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: “I’d say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I’m sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.” In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot’s early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot’s poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot’s friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot’s Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot’s poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences. Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.

Looks at Eliot's poetry and his "fragmentary method" of poetry composition.

When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed his reading of English, Irish, and American literature. Now in this volume, one of our most distinguished readers of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Donoghue's Words Alone is an intellectual memoir, a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot--from initial undergraduate encounters with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to later submission to Eliot's entire writings. "The pleasure of Eliot's words persists," Donoghue says, "only because in good faith it can't be denied." Submission to Eliot, in Donoghue's case, involves the ear as much as it does the mind. He is a reader who listens attentively and a writer whose own music in these pages commands attention. Whether he is writing about Eliot's poetry or confronting the (often contentious) prose, Donoghue eloquently demonstrates what it means to read and to hear a master of language.

Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America." In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot's early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot's poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot's friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot's Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot's poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences. Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.

The modernist poet T. S. Eliot has been applauded and denounced for decades as a staunch champion of high art and an implacable opponent of popular culture. But Eliot's elitism was never what it seemed. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide refurbishes this great writer for the twenty-first century, presenting him as the complex figure he was, an artist attentive not only to literature but to detective fiction, vaudeville theater, jazz, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley. David Chinitz argues that Eliot was productively engaged with popular culture in some form at every stage of his career, and that his response to it, as expressed in his poetry, plays, and essays, was ambivalent rather than hostile. He shows that American jazz, for example, was a major influence on Eliot's poetry during its maturation. He discusses Eliot's surprisingly persistent interest in popular culture both in such famous works as The Waste Land and in such lesser-known pieces as Sweeney Agonistes. And he traces Eliot's long, quixotic struggle to close the widening gap between high art and popular culture through a new type of public art: contemporary popular verse drama. What results is a work that will persuade adherents and detractors alike to return to Eliot and find in him a writer who liked a good show, a good thriller, and a good tune, as well as a "great" poem.

This chronological survey of major influences on T.S. Eliot's worldview covers the poet's spiritual and intellectual evolution in stages, by trying to see the world as Eliot did. It examines his childhood influences as well as the literary influences that inspired him to write his earliest poetry; his life as an American expatriate living in London from 1915 to 1930, including his ill-fated marriage and his intellectual engagement with the literary traditions of his new country; and the ways in which his intellectual pursuits fostered a spiritual rebirth that simultaneously reflected his past and revealed his future, demonstrating how the early Romantic revolutionary became a staunch defender of tradition.

T. S. Eliot was not only one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century—he was also one of the most acute writers on his craft. In On Poetry and Poets, which was first published in 1957, Eliot explores the different forms and purposes of poetry in essays such as "The Three Voices of Poetry," "Poetry and Drama," and "What Is Minor Poetry?" as well as the works of individual poets, including Virgil, Milton, Byron, Goethe, and Yeats. As he writes in "The Music of Poetry," "We must expect a time to come when poetry will have again to be recalled to speech. The same problems arise, and always in new forms; and poetry has always before it . . . an ‘endless adventure.'"