By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The American-born poet, playwright, and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) is one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot was educated at Harvard before moving to Britain, where he settled, becoming a UK citizen in 1927.
Eliot is best-known for his poetry, which is among the most famous modernist writing in the English language. But Eliot’s plays and works of criticism are also worthy of mention, so in our pick of Eliot’s best books below, we make room for a couple of those, too.
Although we believe these are the key books by T. S. Eliot which every reader keen to understand his writing should seek out, we’ve also ranked them in (loose) order, working towards what we consider to be his greatest achievement at the end. We also identify which books the newcomer to Eliot should begin with, in our view.
Poems.
Let’s begin, not right at the beginning, but near the beginning: with T. S. Eliot’s second published volume, Poems (1920). The book, a slightly revised version of the pamphlet Ara Vos Prec which appeared the year before, was published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and contains his great dramatic monologue ‘Gerontion’.
The rest of the volume is divided between poems in French, such as ‘Dans le Restaurant’, and quatrain poems influenced by the hard, satirical, crystalline poems of the nineteenth-century French poet Théophile Gautier. Of these poems, perhaps the highlight is ‘The Hippopotamus’, which can be read as a satire on the established church.
Murder in the Cathedral.
Some fans of Eliot’s drama would opt for his 1939 play The Family Reunion as his finest dramatic success, although we’d also like to give an honourable mention to The Cocktail Party, which possibly had its roots in Eliot’s own strained relationship with his first wife, Vivienne.
But for us, Eliot’s first full play – after several failed attempts to write a modern verse drama, and the pageant play, The Rock, from 1934 – is his greatest achievement for the stage. Murder in the Cathedral was first performed in 1935 in Canterbury Cathedral, where the titular murder (of Archbishop Thomas Becket) took place back in 1170. Here, Eliot’s sometimes stiff and stilted dramatic verse somehow adds to the play’s power as he explores the martyrdom of Becket.
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
Even readers who have little patience for modernist poetry probably know some of Eliot’s verse, thanks to this 1939 collection of poems for younger readers. The volume – which features Bombalurina, Rumpleteazer, Mungojerrie, Gus the Theatre Cat, and most famously of all, Macavity – provided Andrew Lloyd-Webber with the source material for his hit musical Cats, which also incorporated some of Eliot’s other poetry into the show’s song lyrics.
Ash-Wednesday.
Written in the late 1920s following his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, Ash-Wednesday (1930) is one of the great religious poems of the twentieth century, drawing on Dante, the Bible, and various other sources (including Shakespeare) for its allusions. It’s sometimes frustratingly abstract but worth reading, rereading, puzzling over, and spending time with.
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems, 1909-1917.
This is something of an outlier in a list of T. S. Eliot’s books because it wasn’t published until more than thirty years after his death, eventually appearing in 1996. Edited by the great critic and editor Christopher Ricks, Inventions of the March Hare was the suggested title (later crossed out by Eliot himself) for the notebook of poems he kept during his twenties when he was starting out as a poet.
None of the poems in the collection matches his great Prufrock poems (of which more in a moment), but there are some fine lyrics which show the influence of Baudelaire and Laforgue on Eliot’s early work. For this reason, every Eliot enthusiast should get hold of this book, because it helps us to understand the more famous early poems so much better.
The Sacred Wood.
Eliot was one of the most influential literary critics writing in English in the twentieth century. His ideas, such as the ‘objective correlative’ and the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ have been enthusiastically taken up by other critics, and this 1920 collection contains some of Eliot’s most important essays, including ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and ‘Hamlet and His Problems’.
Prufrock and Other Observations.
Those who are new to Eliot’s poetry are advised to start with this, his first poetry collection. It appeared in 1917, with his friend Ezra Pound helping to bankroll the printing costs. Containing just twelve poems, the initial print run of 500 copies would not sell out for five years, but the volume established Eliot as a major new poetic talent.
As well as the seriocomic dramatic monologue which gives the collection its title, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, the book also includes Eliot’s observations of city life (‘Preludes’) and a number of poems inspired by his time spent in Massachusetts while studying at Harvard before the war.
The Waste Land.
This book-length poem, published in 1922, is surely Eliot’s most-studied single work, and perhaps his most famous. It must also be his most quoted (‘April is the cruellest month’, ‘fear in a handful of dust’): a pleasing fact given how frequently Eliot himself quotes from other writers in this work, written in the wake of the First World War.
It’s a challenging poem – Eliot himself added notes to the end, sending readers off to track down his various sources – but endlessly rewarding. Although Prufrock may be the better point of departure for the Eliot novice, this work has been many readers’ – and countless English Literature students’ – first encounter with Eliot, and this 434-line poem can get the poetry-lover hooked on Eliot’s vision of post-war ennui and despair, sending them off to discover the rest of his work.
Four Quartets.
Although Four Quartets (1943), Eliot’s last great poetic achievement, is not the ideal starting-place for the reader new to Eliot’s work, it is the ideal destination. This sequence of four poems composed between 1935 and 1942, completed during the darkest days of the Second World War, divide critics: do they set a crown upon a lifetime’s effort (as Eliot himself puts it), or do they show a weakening of his poetic powers?
The poem is more philosophical than Eliot’s earlier poetry, and some have found it less accessible (and borderline impenetrable). But this is unfair: when Eliot compares the German bomber planes flying over London to a dove with ‘flame of incandescent terror’, or describes a night-time conversation between a man on air raid duty and a mysterious ‘familiar compound ghost’, he does so in ways which resonate with us and render abstract ideas in concrete form.
It is, at times, a very moving sequence, and although it may not be the place to begin with Eliot’s poetry, as he says himself here, ‘In my end is my beginning’ and ‘In my beginning is my end’.