T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style

In this major new study, Ronald Bush probes the complex relationship between the life and work of T.S. Eliot, "one of the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions and obsessions."(Randall Jarrell) Bush demonstrates how Eliot's character was torn by the same conflict that charged his greatest poetry: an almost unbearable tension between romantic yearning and intellectual detachment. Skillfully combining biography and literary analysis, he examines all the factors that contributed to Eliot's personal development and explains why these elements were necessary to the production of his poems. From "Prufrock" and The Waste Land through Four Quarters, Bush traces Eliot's journey of artistic development and relates how his work set the standard for all of twentieth-century writing. An indispensable and beautifully crafted work,T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style makes a major contribution to the scholarship on one of this century's most significant artists.