Research Catalog

Title

T.S. Eliot : a life / Peter Ackroyd.

Author

Ackroyd, Peter, 1949-

Publication

• New York : Simon and Schuster, [1984]
• copyright © 1984

Supplementary Content

Cover image

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Dedalus Foundation, donor NN

Description

400 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits; 24 cm

Summary

• Within his lifetime T.S. Eliot came to be considered the greatest poet of his generation and perhaps the most important poet of this century. Two decades after his death, his reputation, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, remains as secure as ever. His influence has been profound: virtually every poet writing in English in the last fifty years owes a debt to him. Eliot achieved great success during his life. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an influential magazine and book editor, he spoke widely on religion and social issues. But he was also a very private man who remained something of a mystery even to his closest friends. This is only one of a number of paradoxes in Eliot's life. Perhaps chief among them, as this biography demonstrates, was Eliot's insistence on the impersonality of great poetry while at the same time his own work was suffused with his experience and personality. In fact, as Peter Ackroyd points out, "His private choices and obsessions became emblematic of, and in some sense determined our understanding of, the twentieth-century tradition." Eliot insisted on the importance of literary tradition, yet he had no real predecessors or successors. Along with Pound, Joyce, and Woolf, he helped give birth to modernism in literature, but then later in his career he abandoned it. From this biography -- the first authoritative, comprehensive life of Eliot ever published -- we can at last understand the relationship of Eliot's life and work, the better to appreciate his artistic achievement. With this book we now have the first detailed account of Eliot's deeply troubled first marriage, as well as reliable descriptions of the solitude and misery of his middle years and the fulfillment and joy he found late in life in his second marriage. Scrupulously researched, elegantly written and insightful, T.S. Eliot is an accomplished portrait of an extraordinary figure. It will be an essential book for anyone who wants to understand one of the most important writers of the century. - Back cover.
• In the twentieth century, no Anglo-American poet or critic has matched the influence of Thomas Stearns Eliot. Despite his political and religious conservatism, Eliot was among the most innovative of the literary modernists, a figure to be reckoned with by admirers and critics alike. In his Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Peter Ackroyd delves into the work and mind of a man who redefined the very terms of modern poetry.

Subjects

• Poets, American
• Biographies
• 1900-1999
• Eliot, T. S (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
• Poets, American > 20th century > Biography

Genre/Form

Biographies.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-372) and index.

Source (note)

• of the Dedalus Foundation;

Awards (note)

• Whitbread Award, 1984.

Contents

Prelude -- Origins 1888-1906 -- Pursuit of learning 1906-1914 -- Into the vortex 1914-1917 -- Mr. Eliot, the banker 1917-1918 -- Toil, and troubles 1919-1920 -- Collapse 1921-1922 -- Sense of failure 1923-1924 -- In search of faith 1925-1929 -- Woes of marriage 1929-1931 -- Separate lives 1932-1934 -- Beginning again 1934-1935 -- Out of the storm 1935-1939 -- Years of War 1939-1945 -- Rigours of life 1946-1949 -- Public man 1950-1956 -- Happy at last 1957-1965.

Call Number

ReCAP 24-4980

ISBN

• 9780671530433
• 0671530437
• 9780671605728
• 0671605720

LCCN

84005333

OCLC

10557617

Author

Ackroyd, Peter, 1949- author.

Title

T.S. Eliot : a life / Peter Ackroyd.

Publisher

New York : Simon and Schuster, [1984]

Copyright Date

copyright © 1984

Type of Content

text

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-372) and index.

Awards

Whitbread Award, 1984.

Local Note

Copy in ReCAP 24-4980 inscribed.

Source

Gift; of the Dedalus Foundation; 2024. NN

Connect to:

Cover image

Chronological Term

1900-1999

Added Author

Dedalus Foundation, donor NN

Other Form:

Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot. 1986]

Research Call Number

ReCAP 24-4980