The winner of the Nobel Trize for Literature, the twentieth century's most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter, T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult poet-forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic. Now, in this brilliant exploration of T.S. Eliot's work, prize-winning poet Craig Raine reveals that, on the contrary, Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work. Indeed, despite its manifest originality, its radical experimentation, and its dazzling formal variety, his verse yields meaning just as surely as other more conventional poetry. Raine argues that an implicit controlling theme-the buried life, or the failure of feeling-unfolds in surprisingly varied ways throughout Eliot's work. But alongside Eliot's desire "to live with all intensity" was also a distrust of "violent emotion for its own sake." Raine illuminates this paradoxical Eliot-an exacting anti-romantic realist, skeptical of the emotions, yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure-through close readings of such poems as "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and many others. The heart of the book contains extended analyses of Eliot's two master works-The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Raine also examines Eliot's criticism-including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, the auditory imagination-and he concludes with a convincing refutation of charges that Eliot was an anti-Semite. Here then is a volume absolutely indispensable for all admirers of T.S. Eliot and, in fact, for everyone who loves modern literature.

Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society.

Craig Raine's dazzlingly original second novel, The Divine Comedy is a gripping meditation on sex and death and God and the myriad ways in which the human body plays dirty tricks on us. The Divine Comedy is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of an astonishing cast of philanderers and fuckups while along the way, the evidence amasses for a comic, cosmic conspiracy. Craig Raine's second novel, The Divine Comedy, is a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body - its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals.

The twentieth century's most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter, T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult writer-forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic. In this compelling exploration, prize-winning poet Craig Raine finds a way to read and make sense of Eliot's full corpus. He illuminates a paradoxical Eliot--an exacting anti-romantic realist, skeptical of the emotions, yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure--through close readings of his poetry, with extended analyses of Eliot's two master works--The Waste Land and FourQuartets. Raine also examines Eliot's criticism--including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, the auditory imagination, and his biography, crafting a book that provides a concise introduction for beginners and a provocative set of arguments for Eliot admirers.

A genuine tour de force by one of Britain's foremost poets, this latter-day verse epic interweaves fact and fiction with inventive brilliance. At once a vivid history of Europe from 1905 to 1984, and a gripping saga of two families--one English, one Russian--this enormously entertaining narrative is sensual, powerful, and utterly original.

Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, has long been considered an important and vibrant, even controversial, storyteller and poet. The Wish House and Other Stories is a collection of Kipling’s finest works, including the stories “In the House of Suddhoo,” “The Disturber of Traffic,” and “The Eye of Allah,” the poems “The Runners,” “The Return of the Children,” and “The Last Ode,” and his famous story about Afghanistan, “The Man Who Would Be King.” Each piece was selected by poet and scholar Craig Raine, who writes in his Preface, “We need to think about Kipling. He is our greatest short-story writer, but one whose achievement is more complex and surprising than even his admirers recognize.”

'By poetry we - we the masses - mean something vague, something untrue, something uplifting, something beautiful, something so eloquent it isn't for everyday. The word "poetry" is up there with "soul". And I am against it.' My Grandmother's Glass Eye deploys its considerable learning, its intelligent expertise, wittily, memorably. It is an exercise in demystification and clarity. If you want to know how poetry works on the page, here are sure-footed accounts of particular poems. There is something Johnsonian in Craig Raine's common sense - an elegant wrecking ball used with precision and delicacy to pick off the pretentious, the platitudinous, the over-promoted. Here, poetry is well read, attentively read, by a practitioner whose range runs from Bion to John Lennon, from Bishop to Balanchine.