Eliot's Early Years

by Lyndall Gordon

Book Overview

The biographical study proceeds from Eliot's youth, covers his impulsive marriage, the idiosyncratic friendships with Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, the shadowy period of conflicting sexual and religious fantasies in Paris and Boston, and concludes with his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism at age thirty-eight.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198120788
• ISBN13: 9780198120780
• Release Date: April 1977
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent companion to "The Waste Land"

I teach "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in my high school classes, but "The Waste Land" has always been a complete mystery to me. This book, a hybrid of biography and literary criticism, enabled me to understand a large chunk of the poem. It turns out, according to Gordon, that "The Waste Land" is a sort of spiritual clearinghouse for Eliot's religious and personal reflection. I now think it's impossible to adequately interact with the poem without a basic understanding of Eliot's religious philosophy and his personal life. Gordon uses many of Eliot's unpublished poems to illuminate these facets of his life and thought. As such I found it very useful, although it was not an easy read. (The language is rather dry and academic.) Still, I recommend it highly for anyone interested in tackling "The Waste Land."