Description and Objectives

This class will cover Eliot’s life in the context of his major poetic and critical accomplishments and their relationship to literary modernism which Eliot contributed to and critiqued. We will spend the first weeks of class studying Eliot’s life and the poetic traditions preceding him, and then read selections from The Sacred Wood (1920), and his major poems, including The Waste Land (1922) and The Four Quartets (1941).

Textbooks

The Sacred Wood; The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. 

Course Requirements

Weekly typed essays; oral presentations.

Successful Students

“The purpose of literary study is to be able to discuss a work with its author without setting his teeth on edge.”

–Robert Frost