The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 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 poet--forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic.
Now, in this brilliant exploration of T.S. Eliot's work, prize-winning poet Craig Raine reveals that, on the contrary, Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work. Indeed, despite its manifest originality, its radical experimentation, and its dazzling formal variety, his verse yields meaning just as...

A thoughtful and masterful novel in verse by an innovative 20th-century poet.

One of England's foremost poets, Craig Raine offers a "bold, ambitious chronicle of life" (New York Times Review) told through the stories of two families, the Pasternaks and the Raines, who touch each other and are touched by history in different ways. Like a home movie, this novel in verse masterfully conjures the world in which these families move by re-creating the texture of ordinary and extraordinary life. Blending fact, fiction, and thrilling leaps of imagination, History: The Home Movie...

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The most famous day in literature is June 16, 1904, when a certain Mr. Leopold Bloom of Dublin eats a kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, admires a girl on the beach, contemplates his wife's imminent adultery, and, late at night, befriends a drunken young poet in the city's red-light district.

An earthy story, a virtuoso technical display, and a literary revolution all rolled into one, James Joyce's Ulysses is a touchstone of our modernity and one of the towering achievements of the human mind.

Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, has long been considered an important and vibrant, even controversial, storyteller and poet. The Wish House and Other Stories is a collection of Kipling's finest works, including the stories "In the House of Suddhoo," "The Disturber of Traffic," and "The Eye of Allah," the poems "The Runners," "The Return of the Children," and "The Last Ode," and his famous story about Afghanistan, "The Man Who Would Be King." Each piece was selected by poet and scholar Craig Raine, who writes in his Preface, "We need to think about...