T.S.Eliot: An Imperfect Life

by Lyndall Gordon (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $4.19

  Lyndall Gordon traces Eliot's journey across the 'waste land' to his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism at the age of 38. The American influences of his youth are emphasized, and the shadowy period from 1910 to 1914 in Paris and Boston emerges as a time of acute stress, of conflicting sexual and religious fantasies. 'The Waste Land' goes back to this time, and the author shows how the poem evolved from private meditations, later masked by the contemporary scenes that made it appear so dazzlingly modern. Gordon also traces Eliot's search for a 'new life' during the last 38 years of his life. This volume is a condensed and updated version of the two books previously publshed as ELIOT'S EARLY YEARS and ELIOT'S NEW LIFE.

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $34.49

  In this nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's complex spiritual and artistic history ...with tact, diligence, and subtlety (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full the issue of Eliot's anti-Semitism as well as the less-noted issue of his misogyny. Her account rescues both the poet and the man from the simplifying abstractions that have always been applied to him (The New York Times), and is definitive but not dogmatic, sympathetic without taking sides...Its voice rings with authority (Baltimore Sun). Praised by Cynthia Ozick as daring, strong, psychologically brilliant, Gordon's study remains true to the mysteries of art as she chronicles the poet's insistent search for salvation.