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...

This novel is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of a cast of philanderers and mess-ups.

A selection of literary essays written since 1972, this book addresses in detail the work of Dickens, Donne, T. S. Eliot, Coleridge, Dr Johnson, Betjeman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, James Joyce, and many others. Vigilant, sceptical, mistrustful of consensus, Craig Raine stands in the tradition of poet-critics whose task, as Eliot said, is 'the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste'.

From one of our leading contemporary critics and poets comes a fresh, wily, accessible book of poetry in all its forms.