T. S. Eliot

'What is accomplished by this sort of cultural warfare is impossible to say: but it [is] a part of total warfare which one must, as an individual, accept one's part in.'At the height of the Second World War, T. S. Eliot commits himself to fighting for the cultural values of Europe. He goes on a lecture tour of Sweden; he writes talks for the BBC; he reads poems for the Czechoslovak Centre, for 'Aid to Russia' and for the 'French in Britain Fund'. He lectures on 'The Music of Poetry' in Glasgow; addresses the Classical Association; talks at the 'Moot', and visits organisations including the Anglo-Swedish Society and the British-Norwegian Institute; and he works for the Christian News-Letter. He serves as President of the English Circle of 'Books Across the Sea' and as first President of the Virgil Society. He feels exhausted by travel and performance but remains stalwart. And always there is the threat in London - he has 'no regular habitation' - of being bombed: 'I have taken . . . to sleeping in my teeth.'Contacts and correspondents during these dark days include the film director George Hollering for whom he struggles to adapt his play Murder in the Cathedral, Kenneth Clark, Henry Moore, David Jones, William Empson, Mary Trevelyan, Karl Mannheim, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, M. J. Tambimuttu, Edith Sitwell and Reinhold Niebuhr. Notable poets recruited to the Faber fold include Lawrence Durrell, Anne Ridler and Norman Nicholson. Eliot's own creative energies are focused on completing Little Gidding, the final poem of the supernal sequence Four Quartets. The series of letters to John Hayward, who advises him, is a tour de force of the art: full of news, merriment and mischief.

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” T. S. Eliot’s advocacy of “impersonality” as a literary ideal in Tradition and the Individual Talent had an immeasurable impact on Modernist literature and continues to resonate today. An incisive (and controversial) account of individual artists’ relation to their forebears, this essay remains an outstanding work of critical prose.

Modernismens stora poet i ny utgåvaT. S. Eliot förtjänar redan med sina tidiga diktsamlingar en plats bland 1900-talets stora poeter. Debutdikten »J. Alfred Prufrocks kärlekssång« publicerades 1915 i den prestigefyllda tidskriften Poetry, på initiativ av Ezra Pound. Dikten fick ett blandat mottagande. Av några betraktades den som obegriplig och spefull; andra hyllade Eliot för hans banbrytande metod och oefterhärmliga genialitet. I dag betraktas »J. Alfred Prufrocks kärlekssång« som ett av de mest avgörande tidiga modernistiska verken, och som en tydlig brytning med den viktorianska poesin. Eliots poesi är både konkret och djuplodande, exakt och mångbottnad. I ett försök att göra den omtumlandemellan- och efterkrigstiden rättvisa sökte Eliot dikta på ett sätt som satte samman traditionen och förnyelsen, som blandade medeltida legender och framstörtande bilar. Med stor fingertoppskänsla skapade Eliot i sin diktning en form för det moderna livets oförsonade helhet och sammanhang. Omsorgsfullt och precist ringade han in förutsättningarna för människan, då och nu. Dikter 1915-1945 samlar en stor andel av T. S. Eliots viktigaste poesi. Här finns »Fyra kvartetter«, »De ihåliga männen« och Eliots fem landskapsdikter i nya översättningar av Erik Lindman Mata (de sistnämnda dikterna för första gången på svenska), tillsammans med klassiska svenska översättningar av Karin Boye och Erik Mesterton, Johannes Edfelt, Gunnar Ekelöf och Erik Lindegren. Boken har ett introducerande förord av Erik Lindman Mata. THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT [1888-1965] född i St. Louis, Missouri, tillhör de största engelskspråkiga poeterna och var en av modernismens centrala figurer. Hans långdikt Det öde landet betraktas som ett av 1900-talets viktigaste verk. Eliot flyttade som tjugofemåring till England och blev engelsk medborgare 1927, samtidigt som han avsade sig sitt amerikanska medborgarskap. Han umgicks i samma litterära kretsar som Ezra Pound och William Butler Yeats, och bidrog till utgivningen av James Joyce Ulysses.

The Waste Land is a profound poem that examines the fragmented and disillusioned state of the world after World War I. Through its innovative structure and multiple voices, it captures the despair, decay, and alienation of post-war society, weaving together cultural references, myths, and allusions. The poem delves deeply into human experience, portraying the struggle between destruction and rebirth, hope and despair. It contrasts the harshness of spring with the comfort of winter, symbolizing the conflicting forces of renewal and stagnation. Various characters, from a disenchanted typist to the blind seer Tiresias, represent the alienation and confusion in modern life, revealing a world fractured by war and devoid of meaning. As the poem progresses, it suggests that despite the overwhelming sense of fragmentation, there remains a possibility for spiritual redemption and emotional connection. The final sections emphasize the importance of compassion, understanding, and human connection in overcoming the chaos of a broken world. Through its use of language, form, and imagery, The Waste Land remains a seminal work that has had a lasting impact on literature, offering profound insight into the modern human condition.

Chosen by Eliot himself, the poems in this volume represent the poet's most important work before Four Quartets. Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," "The Waste Land," "The Hollow Men," and "Ash Wednesday"--as well as many other fine selections from Eliot's early work.

T. S. Eliot is regarded as the most important poet-critic of modern times, the twentieth century's 'Man of Letters' whose reputation was forged not only on the strength of his verse, but on the enduring influence of his critical writings. The Collected Prose presents those works that Eliot allowed to reach print in the order of their final revision or printing. Publishing across four volumes, the series aims to provide an authoritative and clean-text record of Eliot's approved texts and their revisions, beginning with his formative observations, written while he was at high school, and concluding in his final major opus, To Criticize the Critic, published in the months after his death. This first volume covers the years 1905-1928, a time of dramatic development for Eliot as both a poet and critic that saw the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations, The Waste Land and Journey of the Magi, and a gathering his seminal early essays under the title The Sacred Wood (1920). In his penetrating surveys of poetic form and the literary milieu of the day, he assesses the era's ageing giants, Yeats, Swinburne, Henry James, and hails the arrival of its new generation, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis. The volume also traces Eliot's deepening search for a meaningful response to the trauma of the Great War, and an exploration of religion that led to his confirmation in the Church of England in 1927.

T. S. Eliot is regarded as the most important poet-critic of modern times, the twentieth century's 'Man of Letters' whose reputation was forged not only on the strength of his verse, but on the enduring influence of his critical writings. The Collected Prose presents those works that Eliot allowed to reach print in the order of their final revision or printing. Publishing across four volumes, the series aims to provide an authoritative and clean-text record of Eliot's approved texts and their revisions, beginning with his formative observations, written while he was at high school, and concluding in his final major opus, To Criticize the Critic, published in the months after his death. This second volume spans 1929-1934, a period in which Eliot's poetry was maturing into the reflective verse of Animula, Ash-Wednesday and Marina. It was also a moment that confirmed his critical reputation with the publication of Selected Essays (1932), reprinting and revising his most important essays on Tradition and the Individual Talent, Hamlet, Marvell and Dante, and culminating in the Harvard lectures that became The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933).

T. S. Eliot is regarded as the most important poet-critic of modern times, the twentieth century's 'Man of Letters' whose reputation was forged not only on the strength of his verse, but on the enduring influence of his critical writings. The Collected Prose presents those works that Eliot allowed to reach print in the order of their final revision or printing. Publishing across four volumes, the series aims to provide an authoritative and clean-text record of Eliot's approved texts and their revisions, beginning with his formative observations, written while he was at high school, and concluding in his final major opus, To Criticize the Critic, published in the months after his death. This third volume collects Eliot's prose from 1935-1950, when his works The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and The Music of Poetry (1942) would engage the seminal grounds of his Four Quartets, while his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) would appear at the moment he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was a period of experimentation in form and genre, in which writings for the theatre were taking centre stage and he was composing for the first time for children, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

T. S. Eliot is regarded as the most important poet-critic of modern times, the twentieth century's 'Man of Letters' whose reputation was forged not only on the strength of his verse, but on the enduring influence of his critical writings. The Collected Prose presents those works that Eliot allowed to reach print in the order of their final revision or printing. Publishing across four volumes, the series aims to provide an authoritative and clean-text record of Eliot's approved texts and their revisions, beginning with his formative observations, written while he was at high school, and concluding in his final major opus, To Criticize the Critic, published in the months after his death. This fourth and final volume from 1951-1966, covers a period of concluding productivity in Eliot's writing. Although his poetry was all but complete, his theatrical and critical work flourished through a decade that included such books as Poetry and Drama (1951), The Frontiers of Criticism (1956) and On Poetry and Poets (1957).

T S Eliots inflytelserika diktverk Det öde landet utkom 1922 – samma år som James Joyces viktiga modernistiska roman Odysseus publicerades. Europa var krigshärjat och utvecklingsoptimismen stukad. Det öde landet var det granat- uppfläkta slagfältet men också det förstörda inre landskapet, den allmänna själsliga uppgivenheten. Eliots dikt har blivit ett av den litterära modernismens viktigaste verk, genom sitt omskakande innehåll och sin experimentella form. Tvåspråkig utgåva med den engelska texten på vänstersidorna och den svenska texten på högersidorna. I översättning och med kommentarer av Jonas Ellerström.