T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature provides a comprehensive discussion of the engagement of Eliot with that earlier English literary period which he declared to be his favourite. It offers a full sense of the critical and literary context against which Eliot measured his own ideas on Early Modern poets and playwrights.

• Introduction


• 1: 'Without a Harmonising Medium': Eliot in 1919, and Contemporary Criticism of Early Modern Drama


• 2: 'I am not all Heere': Donne, Marlowe, 'disintegration', and the Development of Dramatic Lyricism by Eliot


• 3: 'Signs Never Come Amiss': Early Modern Voices in Eliot's collected poetry to Poems, 1920


• 4: 'Ideas, and the Sensibility of Thought': The Quest for a Metaphysical Poetry 1920-22


• 5: Cryptograms: The Waste Land, Sweeney Agonistes, and 'The Hollow Men'


• 6: 'The Pattern Behind the Pattern': Ash-Wednesday, the Ariel poems, and 'Coriolan'


• 7: Towards a New Dramatic Articulation: The Rock and Murder in the Cathedral


• 8: 'A Fusion, in Sympathy of Antipathy': Four Quartets and the Late Plays

Steven Matthews is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is author of Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation. The Evolving Debate, 1969 to the Present (Macmillan, 1997); Yeats as Precursor (Macmillan 2000); and Les Murray (Manchester U.P. Contemporary World Writers Series, 2001). He has contributed the volume on Modernism to the Contexts series (Bloomsbury Academic) of which he is founder editor. (2004). He is also editor of the Sourcebooks series for Palgrave, where his book Modernism appeared in 2008.