T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets

John Xiros Cooper author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:14th Dec '95

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T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets cover

This study re-establishes the public dimension of Eliot's career and evaluates his deliberate political agenda.

Criticism of Eliot interprets his work as the private record of an internal spiritual struggle. Professor Cooper re-establishes the public dimension Eliot intended for his poetry. Eliot aimed to reinforce established social structures during a period of painful political transition. This study offers a reinterpretation of Eliot, his work and of Anglo-American relations.Criticism of Eliot has ignored the public dimension of his life and work. His poetry is often seen as the private record of an internal spiritual struggle. Professor Cooper shows how Eliot deliberately addressed a North Atlantic 'mandarinate' fearful of social disintegration during the politically turbulent 1930s. Almost immediately following publication, Four Quartets was accorded canonical status as a work that promised a personal harmony divorced from the painful disharmonies of the emerging postwar world. Cooper connects Eliot's careers as banker, director and editor to a much wider cultural agenda. He aimed to reinforce established social structures during a period of painful political transition. This powerful and original study re-establishes the public context in which Eliot's work was received and understood. It will become an essential reference work for all interested in a wider understanding of Eliot and of Anglo-American cultural relations.

"...Cooper impressively places Eliot in a relation to his readers and the complexities of the world around him that is too rarely considered in a great deal of scholarship on this poet. ...much of value here." Colin A. Clarke, American Studies International

ISBN: 9780521496292

Dimensions: 235mm x 159mm x 21mm

Weight: 555g

252 pages