T.S. ELIOT: The Philosopher Poet

by Alzina Stone Dale

Alzina Stone Dale gives us an excellent review of T.S. Eliot's entire career and it has the important virtue of showing how absolutely integral to his poetic achievements were his religious interests. It is a critical biography that makes just the right sort of book for marking the centennial of Eliot's birth."-Nathan A. Scott

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Poetry, Philosophy

222 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1988

Reviews

[Marilyn McEntyre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lines from Eliot's poems have been life-sustaining for me, healing at times, good reminders of mystery and prophecy and promise. I return to them often and with gratitude. The value of his poems doesn't depend on knowing his life story, but biographies add a dimension of understanding; reading is relational, after all, and I'm glad to know something about who held the pen. Dale's biography of Eliot isn't the first I've read, and probably wouldn't be the first I'd recommend; others are more thorough, more scholarly, and more historically rich. But I loved taking a quiet vacation day after the buzz of Christmas and reading it. She emphasizes the role of Eliot's spiritual journey at each stage of his poetic life, culminating in a deep commitment to Angl0-Catholic Christianity. His "generous orthodoxy" was always ecumenical, and his spirituality both intensely private and, happily for the rest of us, shared luminously with any and all readers, especially in Four Quartets, the wartime poems that have seemed to many critics a culmination where the language of his poems reached its most mystical and prophetic. The book sends me back to his poems refreshed and remembering that they are gifts received and given by a pilgrim soul.