T. S. Eliot, A Life.

New York: Simon and Schuster, (1984). Octavo, boards (hardcover), gilt lettering, 400 pp. Very Good+, with slightly darkened edges; in a Very Good+ dust jacket, with slight wear along edges. From dust jacket: Within his lifetime T. S. Eliot came to be considered the greatest poet of his generation and perhaps the most important poet of this century. Two decades after his death, his reputation, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, remains as secure as ever. Recognized almost immediately as a unique and powerful voice, Eliot had a profound influence: virtually every poet writing in English in the past fifty years owes a debt to him. He reintroduced a poetical style in the theater, and his essays and literary criticism have been required reading for generations. Eliot achieved great success during his life. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an influential magazine and book editor, he spoke widely on religion and social issues. But he was also a very private man who remained something of a mystery even to his closest friends. This is only one of a number of paradoxes in Eliot’s life. Perhaps chief among them, as this biography demonstrates, was Eliot’s insistence on the impersonality of great poetry while at the same time his own work was suffused with his experience and personality. In fact, as Peter Ackroyd points out, “His private choices and obsessions became emblematic of, and in some sense determined our understanding of, the twentieth-century tradition.”