PART ONE:THE WRITER AND HIS SETTING 1
Chronological table 2
1 Briefly,the essentials 8
St Louis 11
Harvard and New England 15
Paris 20
Harvard again 21
England 22
First marriage 23
The Criterion and The Waste Land 26
Conversion 27
Separation 29
Eliot through the thirties 30
War and its consequences 31
Second marriage:life as return 31
2 The religious quest 35
Eliot and religion 35
Puritan concerns 35
Unitarian concerns 38
The claims of the primitive:Sweeney and the animals 40
Mysticism 44
Idealism 45
Facts and action:towards conversion 47
Religion and society:Action Fran？aise 49
Conversion and Ash-Wednesday 51
Puns and paradoxes 51
The city and the desert 53
3 Eliot and the traditions of poetry 56
Edgar Allan Poe 56
Walt Whitman 62
Jules Laforgue 70
Charles Baudelaire 72
Jacobeans and Metaphysicals 75
Virgil 78
Dantc 80
Ezra Pound 84
W.B. Yeats 87
The poets of the thirties 89
The drama 94
4 Eliot and the traditions of criticism 102
Tradition:theme and variations 104
'Dissociation of sensibility' 109
'Obiective correlative' 110
Language and myth:the case of Milton 112
Social criticism:After Strange Gods 114
Social criticism:The Idea of a Christian Society 117
Social criticism:Notes towards the Definition of Culture 118
PART TWO:CRITICAL SURVEY 121
5 A critical examination of some poetry 122
'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' 123
'Gerontion' 127
'The Death of Saint Narcissus' 132
'The Hippopotamus' 135
'Whispers of Immortality' 139
'Journey of the Magi' 141
'Marina' 146
The Waste Land 148
Four Quartets 154
Murder in the Cathedral 161
PART THREE:REFERENCE SECTION 169
Brief biographies 170
Gazetteer 177
Further reading 189
INDICES 191