Defending Humanity

The twentieth century''s most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult writer-forbiddingly learned maddeningly enigmatic. In this compelling exploration prize-winning poet Craig Raine finds a way to read and make sense of Eliot''s full corpus. He illuminates a paradoxical Eliot--an exacting anti-romantic realist skeptical of the emotions yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure--through close readings of his poetry with extended analyses of Eliot''s two master works--The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Raine also examines Eliot''s criticism--including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objective correlative dissociation of sensibility the auditory imagination and his biography crafting a book that provides a concise introduction for beginners and a provocative set of arguments for Eliot admirers.