Volume 25, Number 1 · February 9, 1978
Mr. Eliot's Martyrdom
By Irvin Ehrenpreis
Eliot's Early Years
by Lyndall Gordon
Oxford University Press, 174 pp., $8.95
T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons
by James E. Miller Jr.
Pennsylvania State University Press, 176 pp., $12.95
T.S. Eliot: The Longer Poems
by Derek Traversi
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 238 pp., $3.95 (paper)
The strength of T.S. Eliot's poetry depends on insights that mediate between morality and psychology. Eliot understood the shifting, paradoxical nature of our deepest emotions and judgments, and tried to embody this quality in his style. 'All that concerned my family,' he once said, 'was 'right and wrong,' what was 'done and not done.' ' It became the poet's discovery that what is wrong when acted may be right when remembered, that today's gladness justifies yesterday's grief, and that religious serenity may be the upper side of skepticism.
Review, 5371 words
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