Reader's Guides
Publisher: Thames & Hudson. Country: U.K. Date: 1960s-1970s.
A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis
by George Williamson
Published by Thames & Hudson, London, 1968. 2nd enlarged edition.
Hardcover with dustjacket. 356 pages including Postscript, Epilogue, index and bibliographical note.
Publisher's description and review (from inside front jacket blurb):
"Professor Williamson has provided an illuminating commentary on the work of one of the key figures of twentieth-century literature. Eliot's imagery and his boldly individual use of sources have baffled many readers, leading them to regard Eliot (mistakenly) as a difficult and even perverse writer. Such readers will be grateful to Professor Williamson for clarifying all the apparent obscurities in Eliot's poetry, and also for simulating their enjoyment of it by his critical acuteness. Professor Williamson analyses the poems one by one in chronological order of composition, following the sequence in Collected Poems 1909-1962. In this revised edition of the Reader's Guide, prepared since Eliot's death, he has added an important Epilogue in which he gives a summary of the poet's achievement and of the themes that dominate his work." (...)
'Unusually comprehensive in scope' -- Times Literary Supplement."