This book contains three of Elliot's Poems. Growltiger's Last Stand tells the story of the fate of an ornery cat at the hands, er, paws, of Persian and Siamese cats he disdained. It is an amusing tale, although when read today it doesn't always come across as exactly politically correct! The other two poems talk of the feud between the Pekes and the Pollicles, and describe Jellicle cats. All three poems are entertaining and are illustrated with silly pictures that well-suit the tone of the poems. I believe that the book is better suited to slightly older children than the 4 -8 year-old reading level mentioned above.

I borrowed this book from the Library last year. The story is magnificent. The best part of the book though are the illustrastions. If you enjoy the play Cats and ohter T.S. Eliot poems, i highly suggest this book.

Four Quartets is unarguably Eliot's masterpiece, one of the last things he wrote. It is a notoriously difficult work to read, but Helen Gardner is the authority on the matter.

Although I don't find her writing style to be as accessible as Reibetanz's book on the Four Quartets, she will help anyone to a deeper understanding of these beautiful, philosophical poems. Unfortunately such books tend to be out of print, but if you can find a copy somewhere and you want to come to a better understanding of Eliot's poems, grab it! Otherwise check your library.

During a career spanning 36 years Sir Stanley Matthews left fans with innumerable memories of his breathtaking footballing skills. None of them realised, however, just how astute he was at defining one of the early 20th century's greatest poets. Comparing Eliot's "Mr. Mistoffelees" to Moses' speech on Mount Sinai is perhaps a little far-fetched, but one can forgive old twinkle toes the odd slip now and again. I mean, he was a cracking footballer, wasn't he, even when he played for Stoke. And I'm a Derby fan, so that's high praise indeed.

No biography of Eliot could better capture the thoughts and personality of the young poet than these letters. Eliot had a lively correspondence with so many, including family, friends, editors, and partners in verse. Even the short letters -- like the ones in which Eliot simply announces to his correspondent that he's exhausted and doesn't want to write anything -- give a glimpse of how Old Possum acted.

Eliot's poetry is so cerebral and allusive that when reading it, one can feel at his mercy. In his letters he is far less in control, and the contrast is fascinating.

My review is based only on the Proust chapter; I bought the book because "errancy" is an important element in my work on Proust. In general, this chapter is a disaster, but to her credit, Lamos does a good job articulating some aspects of error, and some of her comments on the narrating/narrated "I" opposition are worth rereading. First, Lamos NEVER cites from the French text! She only works with a translation (Montrcrieff/Kilmartin). No credible scholar would make claims about a text based on its translation. Provide translations for an English speaking audience, surely, but if you are basing your interpretation on what Proust wrote, then you must address the exact words he used, and Proust wrote in French. Second, Lamos succumbs to multi-culti/queer theory newspeak: "This exchange of places between the desiring reader and the desiring text...is analogous to the relation between penetrator and penetrated in the economy of sodomy" (180); the hero's nocturnal wanderings in Venice are "an allegory of anal sex" (187) [certainly some reference, any reference to the words Proust actually uses is called for here...but no]; "The body of the text, originally the enclosure of the self and the site of masturbatory pleasure, is fantasized as the body of the other, penetrated and mastered by a desire that circulates according to the economy of sodomy" (190); "The hero's first mistake is to get to the bottom of Albertine, whose illegibility is a paradigm for the errancy of all texts" (191) [that's right, "all" texts]; referring to Proust's preface to his translation of Ruskin, "Combining his Sodomic and Gomorrahan aesthetics, Proust imagines that this hymenal 'mist which our eager eyes would like to pierce is the last word of the painter's art'" (193); "The structural opposition between the narrating and narrated 'I' parallels another well-worn, dubious distinction: the phallus and the penis" (198); "The ambiguous factual/fictive status of the text is thus directly linked to the enigma of lesbianism....by posing female same-sex desire as an occult mystery, Proust fictionalizes fact and factualizes fiction, making it impossible to account for one in terms of the other" (199); "Above all, the novel incites the desire to expose the hero's-and Proust's-homosexuality" (215). Above all? Above all! Lamos' goals are commendable: to show the "errancies" or heterogeneous elements in texts that appear monolithic and coherent. But the outcome is embarrassing and laughable. Her ideas are malformed compared to Sedgwick's, and even though her syntax might be less complex than that of "Epistemology of the Closet," her writing in general is poor. She does not develop ideas or make transitions between paragraphs. It's as if she had a collection of loose notes and ideas that she's intent on including, even if they make little sense as a whole. This book has been well-reviewed here at Amazon. For me it was a total waste of [money]. If you do really want to read it, I suggest you look for it at the library of your local university.

Despite having only read the sections of this book that deal with Proust, I feel comfortable saying that Colleen Lamos makes excellent use of wonderful insights in her work. Concentrating on volumes of Proust that other critics consider "digressions," she is able to address important epistemological issues that cannot be ignored in any true reading of Proust. If you liked Sedgwick, you'll love Lamos--her ideas are just as good, and her writing infinitely more readable.

Colleen Lamos' text is wonderfully insightful. I have only had the opportunity to read the sections dealing with Marcel Proust, but their quality can only point to how wonderful the rest of the book must be. Any lover of the works of these three authors will benefit tremedously from Dr. Lamos' work.

Caveat emptor: nothing later than 1922 in this collection - i.e. nothing from 'The Hollow Men', 'Ash-Wednesday', 'Ariel' poems, the Four Quartets, etc. etc. A seriously deficient selection.

Excellent selection of poetry and poetry-related essays by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. NOTE: previous reviewer seems to have confused Coleridge with Eliot. Coleridge DID NOT WRITE The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, or Ash Wednesday -- THAT is why those are not in this book. He DIED in 1834!!

I have always been impressed with the man T.S. Eliot but I cannot say the same about his biogrpaher, Lyndall Gordon. This book made my eyes go buggy and released the bats in the bellfry of my brain! I read this book when I was very sick and it was a very poor choice to say the least. I found her writing style thick with euphemisms, abrstractions, and other vague notions. Very little is mentioned about the man Eliot himself! What a ridiculous concept for a biography. She includes far too many segments of his poetry that only make sense in context. She spews them all over the book and leaves the reader wondering aloud, "Say what?". Though this book has a marvelous, intriguing cover it has nothing but blurry accounts of the man, T.S. Eliot. Find another biographer and you will be better off.

The biographer is so obsessed with Eliot's enigmatic inner state that she forgets to mention the things that happened to him during his life. Gordon speaks of Eliot's desire to enlist in WWI without ever explaining why; she never mentions his attitude toward World War II; she doesn't say that he was expelled from high school, what he majored in at college, what his income was during his years of fame, what kind of contact he kept in with his family and how they thought of him later in his life, what kind of contions he liked to write under in the early years, why he put so many allusions in his poetry if he disdained allusion-hunting. On the other hand, we do get excruciatingly detailed biographies of women like Emily Hale, Mary Trevelyan, and Vivienne Haighwood. The book tries to bore into Eliot's psyche and present all of his poetry as autobiographical, despite the damage done to readings of both the life and the poetry.

This biography is well-done, far superior to Peter Ackroyd's dull and uninspired "Life." What's most important about Lyndall Gordon's biography is her ability to provide us with a roadmap of Eliot's spiritual life and growth, which is a key to grasping the import of Eliot's poems. The inner life, by definition, is extremely difficult for someone else to grasp, and even more difficult to describe for others, but Gordon has managed to arrive at an understanding of Eliot's spiritual life, and to put it into good solid prose for the rest of us. I found this book to be most helpful. Gordon's insights into the inner life of T.S. Eliot are recommended for anyone interested in the man and the poems.

Dear Amazon reader (or listerner for this matter) please read this before you buy T.S. Eliot's tapes. When I first opened the box and placed the tape into the player, it was as though I had let a demon out into my room. T.S. Eliot's voice is very unattractive, and utterly disgraceful. I love T.S. Eliot's works and to listen to him read them (with absolute no rythym)was unbearable. Rather than buying this, you should just buy His complete works. Thank you.

The poetry itself is great, but you wouldn't know it listening to this tedious depressing voice. I supose it could be good to know how Eliot himself thought the poetry should sound, but I think I will stick with my own fantasy of how it should sound.

I suspect anyone coming to Eliot for the first time through this collection would probably give up and turn to someone else.

Eliot's voice reading his own poems. The sound of a pair of ragged claws scratching across the shores of silent seas... Anyway, although a rough reference there, I know, his dry, almost detached demeanor reflected in his monophonic, monotonic voice perfectly captures the true tenor and substance of the poems. I would highly recommend these tapes for anyone into Elliot's work.

The early twentieth century, particularly between the wars, will no doubt come to be seen as a Renaissance of the modern era in all departments of thought and human activity. Consequently, it is of some interest to view it from the perspective of a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, and it is this view that is presented to us through the eyes of T. S. Eliot's wife.
Unfortunately, we are no longer in that renaissance, but in a time of disillusionment and dissolution. All the great symbols are worn away, and what remains of major themes is turned into soap opera. The main thrust of this book is to paint a sinister portrait of Eliot and Bertrand Russell, and to create a victim out of the Muse and the power behind the intellectual throne of the day. There are interesting episodes here, which barely throw a small light on the minds of the major players, and it is difficult to believe that it was as incestuous and claustrophobic a community as painted here.
The interpretation of T. S. Eliot's poetry is decidedly suspect. For instance, the hidden laughter of children, so important an image in the Quartets as symbolic of the timeless, is taken here to be derived from 'mocking' laughter. It is often second-rate analysis or just plain muddled or wrong.
In order to paint a picture of the forgotten heroine, it is necessary to demote the status of the work to make her image stand out. This is achieved superficially by reducing the motivation of the work to the lowest common denominator, as though it may be derived from some form of closet homosexuality. This is to misunderstand the work as well as the symbolic significance of sexuality. That, unfortunately, is only to be expected these days. The painted picture of the spurned wife is indeed constructed by the author, who depicts her as one blown by the winds of fate in some tragic hurricane, passively standing by as she is robbed of her light that is fed on by others, and without which the poetry and the plays would not have been forthcoming.
Much that is written here is already well-known and has appeared elsewhere. This book, however, hardly emulates or enlightens, and reads more like a re-working to support the rather suspect thesis of the spurned Muse. T. S. Eliot was no saint and was well aware of his failures, condemned by his own words to move from wrong to wrong. This kind of biography sheds little light on those times and judges too harshly and too quickly, as though our hindsight alone is proof of our enlightenment. On the contrary, it is the hallmark of dogmatic thinking which we have moved into, and unfortunately, such tabloid journalese is what passes for erudition these days. I expect it will sell very well.

This author is so deep into tittle-tattle that she forgets to write about her subject. A judicious editing would have helped this dreary bio immensely.

Carole Seymour-Jones, a daring and insightful writer, has given us an important book about a neglected but gifted (and, of course, maltreated) woman, who has heretofore been expected to remain in the shadow of her rather mean-spirited ex-husband. This book is a necessary corrective to the prevailing narrative of Eliot's life and is thus all the more welcome.

Craig Raine's In Defence of T.S. Eliot is a series of useful and interesting literary essays, one of which focuses on T.S. Eliot's Anti-semitism. Generally quite sound criticism, if not thoroughly scholarly, Raine knows what he is talking about. His style is accesible to all, and it is that kind of light literary criticism one can read in bed. The dictum out on the streets is the following: Raine may be accessible, but he is definately not readable. This however applies to his poetry and not to his criticism (which is, as stated before, not too bad). For a touch of Raine's poetic genius, check out his latest (i think) long poem, titled: a la recherche du temps perdu, to my dead Mistress... have fun.