Description
This seminal book, Eliot's first collection of literary criticism, appeared in London in 1920, two years before The Waste Land. It contains some of his most influential early essays and reviews, among them 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', 'Hamlet and his Problems', and Eliot's thoughts on Marlowe, Jonson and Massinger, as well as his first tribute to Dante. Many of his most famous critical pronouncements come from the pages of The Sacred Wood.
Reviewing his career as a critic in 1961 Eliot wrote that 'in my earlier criticism, both in my general affirmations about poetry and in writing about authors who influenced me, I was implicitly defending the sort of poetry that I and my friends wrote. This gave my essays a kind of urgency, the warmth of appeal of the advocate, which my later, more detached and I hope more judicial essays cannot claim.' This urgency is still apparent more than eighty years after the essays first appeared.
The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot has - like most of the Nobel Prize-winner's work - become essential reading for anybody interested in poetry, literature, or the history and culture of England. Including 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', 'Hamlet and his Problems' and analyses of writers such Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Dante.
About the Author
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He settled in England in 1915 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.
Book Information
ISBN 9780571190898
Author T. S. Eliot
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publisher Faber & Faber
Weight(grams) 140g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 128mm * 12mm