T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews

Jewel Spears Brooker presents the most comprehensive gathering of newspaper and magazine reviews of Eliot’s work ever assembled. Including reviews from both American and British journals, Brooker expands on major themes within the reviews to demonstrate how they influenced not only Eliot, but also literary history in the twentieth century. Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot was also extremely prolific. This volume is a testament to both aspects of his work.

Review

“Jewel Spears Brooker has done a fine job executing this massive project. On the one hand, Brooker presents a wide range of reviews of individual works, yet she manages to weed out redundancies, passages that do not relate to Eliot, and most well-known quotations of Eliot’s own work. There is very little repetition of content, even in sections where an extremely generous number of reviews of an individual work appear… Also, Brooker’s exellent introduction provides a variety of very helpful contexts for reading the reviews. Given the rich content, this is a volume that all academic libraries need to own.”

– English Literature in Transition, Richard Badenhausen, Westminster College

“These reviews are often remarkably insightful at the same time that they reveal divergences that continue to the present.”

– Books and Culture, Daniel Taylor, Bethel College