Selected Essays (Paperback, New ed)

This is the first large and representative book of T. S. Eliot's prose and it is being published just at the time when Mr. Eliot is returning to America for the Harvard lectures. A year ago Edmund Wilson wrote: "The extent of Eliot's influence is amazing.... T. S. Eliot has done more than perhaps any other modem critic to effect a revaluation of English literature. He has brought back to English criticism something of that trenchant rationalism which he admires in the 18th century, but with a much more catholic appreciation of different styles and points of view."

As Mr. Wilson indicates, the essays of T. S. Eliot have had a remarkable and abiding influence in particular tendencies of the contemporary study and appreciation of English literature. His essays on the Elizabethan dramatists, for example, have rescued some of the most notable Elizabethans from ill-merited oblivion and have reestablished others. His critical efforts have been largely responsible for a renewed interest in Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Donne, and the School of Donne. Moreover, the essays on Dante, the discussions of humanism, of the poetic drama, and of the function of criticism have had immediate and wide influence.

All of these major essays are included in this volume, together with six or seven long essays that have not before been published in America. The book is one that will be as indispensable to the informed reader as to the student of English literature.