The Voice of the Poet - T.S. Eliot - Audio CD and Book
Brand New : 1Audio CD and Book of the Poems
Featuring rare archival recordings of the featured poet reading his own work! Each program in Random House Audio Voices' exclusive THE VOICE OF THE POET series is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.
About the Author T.S. Eliot
(26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965), was a poet, dramatist, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot was born in the United States, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. Of his nationality and its role in his work, Eliot said: "[My poetry] wouldn’t be what it is if I’d been born in England, and it wouldn’t be what it is if I’d stayed in America. It’s a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from Americ
In 1927, Eliot took two important steps in his self-definition. On 29 June he converted to Anglicanism and in November he dropped his American citizenship and became a British subject. In 1928, Eliot summarised his beliefs when he wrote in the preface to his book, For Lancelot Andrewes that "the general point of view [of the book's essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion." Eliot was a vestryman of his parish church, Saint Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr. By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard University offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932-1933 academic year, he accepted, leaving Vivien in England. Upon his return in 1933, Eliot officially separated from Vivien. He avoided all but one meeting with his wife between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. (Vivien died at Northumberland House, a mental hospital north of London, where she was committed in 1938, without ever having been visited by Eliot, who was still her husband.) From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat with his friend, John Davy Hayward, who gathered and archived Eliot's papers and styled himself Keeper of the Eliot Archive. He also collected Eliot's pre-"Prufrock" verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge in 1965.
Eliot's second marriage was happy but short. On 10 January 1957, he married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, to whom he was introduced by Collin Brooks. In sharp contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Miss Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949. Like his marriage to Vivien, the wedding was kept a secret to preserve his privacy. The ceremony was held in a church at 6.15 a.m. with virtually no one other than his wife's parents in attendance. Valerie was 37 years younger than her husband. Since Eliot's death she has dedicated her time to preserving his legacy; she has edited and annotated The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land. Eliot died of emphysema in London on 4 January 1965. For many years, he had health problems owing to his heavy smoking, often being laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. His body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and, according to Eliot's wishes, the ashes taken to St Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to America. There, a simple wall plaque commemorates him with a quote from his poem, "East Coker": "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning." On the second anniversary of his death, a large stone placed on the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey was dedicated to Eliot. This commemoration contains his name, an indication that he had received the Order of Merit, dates, and a quotation from his poem, "Little Gidding": "the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."
For a poet of his stature, Eliot's poetic output was small. Eliot was aware of this early in his career. He wrote to J. H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, that "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event." Typically, Eliot first published his poems in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets consisting of a single poem (e.g., the Ariel poems) and then adding them to collections. His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In 1920 Eliot published more poems in Ara Vos Prec (London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had the same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the American edition. In 1925 Eliot collected The Waste Land and the poems in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and added "The Hollow Men" to form Poems: 1909–1925. From then on he updated this work (as Collected Poems). |
