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T.S. Eliot: The Making Of An American Poet, 1888-1922
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From the Publisher
"For a figure as elusive as Eliot, whose runic remains no two readers interpret the same way, this makes for a valuable compendium--a kind of do-it-yourself portrait kit."--Brian Hall, The Wilson Quarterly
"Given the importance of James E. Miller's previous work on Eliot for understanding the erotic energies driving his poetry, T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet is an especially welcome event. This biography represents the culmination of decades of research and will be indispensable reading for Eliot scholars." --Tim Dean, University at Buffalo (SUNY)
About the Author
James E. Miller, Jr. is the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Chicago. Penn State Press also published his earlier book, T. S. Eliot's Personal Wasteland (1977). He is also the author of The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's Legacy in the Personal Epic (1979) and Leaves of Grass: America's Lyric-Epic of Self and Democracy (1992).
17/01/2007
This is a fascinating book that throws a flood of light on matters about which one had long been curious. Eliot's youth was intense and privileged, a crisscross of stimuli shaping a great poet, who here more than ever is seen as the product of American soil. There are "paths not taken" and "jolly corners" on every side and one could project from this biography a hundred possible Eliots. That the author of so revolutionary as poem as "Prufrock" (at age 23) should devote years to a thesis on F. H. Bradley is only one of the paradoxes of this career.
The puzzles of Eliot's sexuality are illuminated - several, because that makes the practical side less evident." Pacing city streets at night, he was tormented - "the awful daring of a moment's surrender" made possible only confidence, and able to take deep plunges into many domains of "knowledge and experience" (notably in three years' study of Sanskrit and Eastern religion under Woods, Lanman and Anesaki).
Miller commits some odd solecisms, calling the Pantheon (rue Soufflot) the Parthenon, attributing "pray for us at the hour of our death" to the Lord's Prayer, referring to "Wilde's opera, Salome," but his archeology of the poet's youth deals in a sensitive and scholarly way with its sources, making up for various Aspernian holocausts, and he does not exceed the bounds of sensible speculation in his biographical decipherment of the poems.
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