Thomas Stearns Eliot, American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic, had a noteworthy influence on Anglo-American culture in the decades following the first World War. No doubt a ‘difficult’ poet, Eliot wrote poems that often require detailed annotations for the serious reader to understand the several shades and layers of meaning in them.

The present study offers a comprehensive critical perspective on T.S. Eliot. The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides a perceptive introduction to the poet and his works, including his plays and criticism, while placing him in his socio-literary context.

The second section presents focussed critical interpretation and textual analysis of some twenty poems of Eliot—a selection from Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems 1920, and the Ariel Poems, besides the longer poems, The Hollow Men, The Waste Land, and Ash-Wednesday. Each poem has an introduction which details the sources and influences for it; the poem is then analysed and its thematic development traced; then comes the critical appraisal of the work—in which the intricacies of imagery, diction and versification, and its ‘meaning’ are elucidated.

The third section provides extensive annotations of each of the poems selected for the critical study. The critical discussion ranges over the subject matter, thematic development and stylistic features of each poem in particular and Eliot’s poetry in general. The views of well-known critics are incorporated, wherever necessary, to bring out the many-faceted genius of Eliot.

This book is a comprehensive and in-depth study, which will, it is hoped, be of immense help to student and general reader alike, in understanding some of the best known of T.S. Eliot’s poems.