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Voices & Visions

T. S. Eliot

Eliot's life, influence, and poetry from the bold originality of "Prufrock" to the probing, meditative style of "Four Quartets" are explored with photos, archival footage, and discussion with friends, critics, and scholars.

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T. S. Eliot has been considered by many to be the leading American poet of this century. His contemporaries in the 1920s recognized in “The Waste Land” an expression of the exhaustion and fragmentation that afflicted so many in that post-war era. They also recognized the originality of Eliot’s poetic technique and admired his insistence on the need for spiritual values in an age of popular kitsch.

 

Additional Resources

Academy of American Poets

Attend an Eliot reading of “La Figlia Che Piange,” read other Eliot poems and a succinct Eliot biography, and discover an excellent bibliography. An article/exhibit on the modernist revolution includes a brief discussion of “what is arguably the most famous poem of the twentieth century”–“The Waste Land.”

Columbia University’s Bartleby Archive: T. S. Eliot

Read what Eliot had to say about Hamlet, Christopher Marlowe, and William Blake in his Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Stay to read many of Eliot’s finest poems, including “The Waste Land.”

What the Thunder Said

This site has a timeline of Eliot’s life, a list of other Eliot sites, and even a brief review of Tom and Viv, a film about Eliot’s doomed relationship with his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood.

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