Leah Newman's Robert Frost: The People, Places, and Stories Behind His New England Poetry provides an invaluable companion to the beloved poetry of Robert Frost. Newman not only provides the context of Frost's personal history as a backdrop for his poetry, but also provides key literary references, literary criticism, and annotations on the reception of his work in his lifetime. The essays accompanying Frost's poems are lively and warm, often punctuated by Frost's own words. Newman brings Frost's relationships to his family and his work to life in this collection, without diminishing the richness or subtlety of his poetry. I highly recommend this volume to life-long students of Frost's work as well as newcomers.

Lea Newman is able to make her reader's introduction to a major American poet easy, fun and memorable in Robert Frost: The People, Places And Stories Behind His New England Poetry. Newman's concise and informative essays accompany each of thirty-six of Frost's early New England poems including his "The Road Not Taken"; "Mending Wall"; "The Death Of The Hired Man"; and "Birches". Biographical information and his own commentaries provides insights into what Frost was doing and thinking when he wrote each poem. Newman's format of combining essay and poetry enables the reader to experience Frost's poetry with a fresh appreciation and insight. Robert Frost is "must" reading for anyone who ever thrilled to this great man's poetic genius and enduring wisdom.

T.S. Eliot raises some intriguing questions in Choruses from the Rock concerning the knowledge we may lose in information or the wisdom we may lose in knowledge. Patricia Sloane's book belies these losses, for in her book no knowledge is lost in information and no wisdom is lost in knowledge. This book is by far the most amazing piece of scholarship it has ever been my pleasure to come across. Ostensibly about a couple of Eliot's early poems, the book is packed with insights into so many different threads of history and literary history that it would be impossible to list them all even in a much longer review. I would not hesitate in calling Patricia Sloane the most careful reader of them all. The book is full of surprises every step of the way, and the surprises always strike the reader as exemplifying the art of reading at its very best. I would call what Patricia Sloane does the art of "corrective" reading, for she shows us in innumerable and always highly convincing ways that readers who have found innuendoes of anti-Semitism in some of T.S. Eliot's poems have simply missed the point. The so-called anti-Semitic passages are actually criticisms of anti-Semitism, occasionally in the most playful of ways. One of the things this amazingly scholarly and wonderfully readable book does is to explore and expose the nature of prejudicial readings that find fault not because the fault is in the text but because they read the fault into the text. Patricia Slaone traces with easy-going relentlessness all the intricate connections that can possibly be found in Eliot's poems - between Eliot and Dante, on the one hand, or Eliot and James Joyce, on the other. These connections then highlight innumerable others, implicating Homer as well as the Bible in refreshing new connections that finally culminate in the largest possible context the human mind is capable of holding. While reading this book I kept saying "yes, of course," though what I found myself assenting to is not so much an example of Alexander Pope's famous observation about what often was thought but never so well expressed, but a completely new arrangement of this observation, for reading Patricia Sloane's first volume in a projected trilogy strikes the reader more in the nature of what never was thought until Patricia Slaone has finally expressed it. And now that she has, we cannot help but think it. Her book on T.S. Eliot is probably the best out there. I am certainly looking forward to the volumes to follow.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Eliot's poetic method in general, especially of the earlier work, and obviously the Bleistein poems in particular. A must read for any academic whose work touches upon (supposed) anti-Semitism, the Bleistein and Sweeney poems, and Eliot's method of allusion and satire. I'm looking forward to reading the next two volumes in the series of which this is the first.

Arwin

(Shyamal Bagchee, who wrote the introduction, is the Vice-President of the T. S. Eliot Society and the founder of the Yeats-Eliot Review.)

What is there to say about T.S. Eliot's waste land? Nothing, that isn't already said. Read it, a couple of times, and let it flow down on you and make you breathless. No other poem (well, perhaps "Hollow Men" by Eliot can do that) has that power.

We're living in i waste land.
Thanks T.S.

"The Wasteland" is an absolute "must-read" for anyone interested in poetry, or even in society in general from Eliot's fascinating era. It has a different tone than some of his other well-known work, almost nihilistic- in part, a reaction to the war, but also a timeless commentary on human life and the emptiness that often accompanies it.

For those who believe that T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' is a critical part of twentieth century liturature, Valerie Eliot's book about the creation of that poem is a must-read, be it for a scholar or the general reader.

The book nicely reproduces the original drafts of Eliot's Poem, complete with annotations and recommendations by Eliot's good friend and advisor Ezra Pound. Through these early drafts, the reader can see both the large amount of text that was cut and the fact that the final part of the poem "what the thunder said" went virtually unchanged from the first draft to publication. If you hope to understand the challenging, complex text of 'The Waste Land', this is a fine place to begin.

Valerie Eliot's publication of her late husband's Waste Land manuscripts affords the reader an opportunity to delve beneath the mysteries surrounding this truly remarkable poem. Hailed as the "greatest poem of the 20th century", a masterpiece which "captured the disillusionment of a generation"; indeed, as the "justification" of Ezra Pound's modernist "experiment", yet referred to by Eliot, himself, as "just a piece of rythmical grumbling", the Waste Land is sure to spark off in any reader a burning desire to know more than Eliot's powerful words can ever themselves explain.

Written primarily during a "rest cure" on "Margate Sands" ("I can connect Nothing with Nothing") and Laussanne, Switzerland; following what Eliot's London doctor diagnosed as a "nervous breakdown", but which the poet refferred to in his letters as an "aboulie", or state of "emotional derangement"; it is little wonder that the poem is not an easy one to come to grips with. In the years following it's publication, countless readers and critics, following the "clues" left by the poet in his now infamous "Notes", have charged off in pursuit of answers and meanings in places they shall never be found. Eliot later explained to his friend, Pound, on whom the poet had bestowed the task (or honour, in this critic's opinion) of editing his original manuscript - that his "Notes" had done little more than lead his readers on a wild goosechase after holy grails and other crazy things which had little bearing on the poem itself. The fact that Pound, the editor, chose, and was permitted by the author, to slash out over half of the original Waste Land fragments in an operation which he described as the "Caesarian Operation" speaks volumes for itself. For it was in this operation that Pound's theories on Vortisism and Imagisme, and Eliot's own theories on poetic "impersonality" and committment to the "Great Tradition" were fused. The result - the final masterwork, the "cult" poem we know today. In the manuscript publication, the missing pieces to Eliot's inticate puzzle are at last to be found .If you are an Eliot fan, or have any interest whatsoever in the Modernist movement, or the inner workings of a creative genius' mind - this book is an absolute MUST !

Upon reading the aforementioned work by the great and amiable Englishman Russel Kirk, I have been forced to come to conclusion that the work is, in general, well-written and, in particular, quite enlightening. His explanations of Eliot's important poetical works are biographically sound, and are given support by cross-references to other prose pieces by Eliot himself (whether from Eliot's own _Criterion_ or some other publication). The fact that Kirk was a friend of Eliot's gives the book great strength and objectivity. I recommend this book to any who are at all serious in their study of Eliot. It is a work no true fan of Eliot can do without, humbuggery notwithstanding.

Yours truly,

Andy Younan, Esq.

I bought this book when it came out in 1995. It is a critique of interpretative criticism from Eliot to Derrida, finding unlikely parallels in the academic response to the two writers' work.

I found it a very clear and biting analysis of the current position of 'theory' in lit crit and academia. It is very clearly written, lively in its argument, and helpful if you are looking for a reasoned attack on all the irritating bogies of 'theory'.

(It is worth making the point, however, that Derrida is mainly a philosophical critic, and cannot necessarily be held responsible for much of the nonsense written by the poorer advocates of 'theory'; and so anyone looking for a fuller critique should probably stick to Christopher Norris's 'Derrida'. Or even read Derrida himself - 'Aporias' demonstrates his approach.)

But this author can write. As his argument involves a major criticism of the motives of European and American academics and their 'careers', it probably helps that he teaches in Australia!

Through the exploration of the lives and works of four profoundly influential American literary "insurgents," Zwerdling tells the story of their transgenerational fight to clear a space for the recognition of the worthiness American literature among English and European elites.

Engaging, thought-provoking and often surprisingly moving, we follow the expatriate careers of Henry Adams and Henry James in the mid to late 19th and early 20th century, followed by the modernist careers of Pound and Eliot in the early to middle 20th century. Zwerdling makes an extremely good case for cultural power's linkage to economic power by showing how Adam's and James cultivated reputations in both the U.S. and England, laying the groundwork for a idea of a shared Anglo-Saxon Literature just at the time when America was becoming recognized as having usurped England's role as the world's most vital economic and cultural power. Pound and Eliot build on the foundations laid by Adams and James, fully confident that as Americans they will no longer be treated as second-class literary citizens. They employ different strategies in their own "siege of London" but Eliot to a large degree succeeds in becoming the final arbiter of all literary disputes and grand critic of modernist literature. As America takes center stage at the end of WWII, American's version of world modernist literature and culture, not surprisingly, come to predominate forming the core of the canon of Modern Literature as taught in the University.

The literary insurgency takes it's toll on all four of our literary heroes, however. Adams comes to despise much of English culture and mores. James does his best writing after a long-delayed trip back to America after nearly a lifetime abroad, writings that imaginatively explore what kind of man he might have become had he stayed in his native land. Pound wears out London literary society in a few short years and abandons the field. Eliot adopts the manners of a high-toned Englishman to such an extent that he sets back the appreciation of other American writers thirty years (according to William Carlos Williams). Nevertheless, he too, writes some of his best later work after a visit to America.

In becoming expatriates they wander far afield of their original inspiration. In becoming accepted, they lose some of the insurgent edge. Of all of these James remains the most alive to the stirrings of new possibilities and the shifting relations of power between Americans and English elites.

I find that reading just the first two essay was worth the money I spent on this book. Pound writes his literary essay with creativity, intelligence, and humor that are rare even among the best essayists. "A retrospect" is a great guide to use for those who takes interest in writing poetry. Likewise "How to Read" will serve as a great crash course for the history of poetry, and provides us with an instruction on how to approach poetry. His personal critique of other writers are also worth reading.

If you are a Cats fan and feeling withdrawal symptoms since the musical closed on Broadway, you have several choices to feel better. You can fly to London and see the show there. You can watch the terrific videotape of the show. Or for a smaller investment in time and money, you can read your copy of this delightful book. Although billed as a children's book, this book is really for children of all ages who love T.S. Eliot's work.

Researchers constantly find that reading to children is valuable in a variety of ways, not least of which are instilling a love of reading and improved reading skills. With better parent-child bonding from reading, your child will also be more emotionally secure and able to relate better to others. Intellectual performance will expand as well. Spending time together watching television fails as a substitute.

To help other parents apply this advice, as a parent of four I consulted an expert, our youngest child, and asked her to share with me her favorite books that were read to her as a young child. Mr. Mistoffelees with Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer was one of her picks.

Our daughter has seen Cats so many times that she cannot remember the number. Some of our happiest experiences came when she and I went to the show together, having worn out the rest of the family's interest years earlier. Each time she saw the show, Mr. Mistoffelees was her favorite character. After reading the poem here, you, too, will become more taken with Mr. Mistoffelees.

This book contains two poems from T.S. Eliot's 1939 collection of poems, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The musical was based on these poems. In this version, the poems are beautifully enhanced by very colorful, well-composed, and witty art by Errol Le Cain. This book won a Parent's Choice award in 1991.

Mr. Mistoffelees is "The Original Conjuring Cat" and can perform many wonderful and funny tricks. His best trick is to produce "seven kittens right out of a hat." After you see him at work, you'll say

"Oh!

Well I never!

Was there ever

A cat so clever

As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!"

If you are like me, you'll sing the verses as you read them.

Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were "a very notorious couple of cats." "As knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians, tight-rope walkers and acrobats they had an extensive reputation." "They were highly efficient cat-burglars as well, and remarkably smart at smash-and-grab." If anything was missing or awry, "Then the family would say: 'It's that horrible cat!'"

After you have bathed in the beautiful glow of T.S. Eliot's good humor and been warmed by the reflected light of the illustrations, I suggest that you consider writing some children's verse yourself. And the best way to do it well, is to enlist a child to help you. However the poetry turns out, you'll have wonderful memories together.

"And there's nothing at all to be done about that!"

Like her former partner Robert A. Johnson, Helen Luke is a master of rendering the psychological meanings in great literature understandable and relevant to all people wishing to gain a deeper level of understanding about the growtn of the human soul. Having plumbed the depths of her own psycho-spiritual aging process(Such Stuff As Dreams are Made On), Ms. Luke has created a work fusing literary scholarship and personal experience into a guide for all of us to follow towards the inevitable. When the time comes for me to plant my oar (read her interpretation of The Odyssey)and turn towards the life of prayer, song and storytelling I will be eternally grateful to have had this wonderful Wise Woman as my guide. Deserving of a wide readership.