Thomas Stearns Eliot, American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic, had a remarkable influence on Anglo-American culture in the decades following the first World War. He was undoubtedly a ‘difficult’ poet. Eliot wrote poems that often require detailed annotations to understand the several shades and layers of meaning in them.

Hopefully, this effort will be of immense help to the students and general readers alike in their literary pursuit as well as in various competitive exams, requiring knowledge of English literature.

This book offers a comprehensive critical perspective on T.S. Eliot, and is divided into three sections:

• The first section deals with a perceptive introduction to the poet and his works, including his plays and criticism, while placing him in his socio-literary context.
• The second section presents focused critical interpretation and textual analysis of some twenty poems—a selection from Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems 1920, and the Ariel Poems, besides the longer poems, The Hollow Men, The Waste Land, and Ash-Wednesday. Each poem has an introduction which details the sources and influences for it; the poem is then analysed and its thematic development traced; then comes the critical appraisal of the work—in which the intricacies of imagery, diction and versification, and its ‘meaning’ are elucidated.
• The third section offers extensive annotations of each of the poems selected for the critical study. The critical discussion encompasses the subject matter, thematic development, and stylistic features of each poem, in particular, and Eliot’s poetry, in general. The views of well-known critics are incorporated, wherever necessary, to bring out the many-faceted genius of Eliot.