Guides for the Perplexed

"Among the innumerable Eliot guides on the market, this is the one to start with. Avoiding the all too common approaches to this notoriously perplexing poet - allusion hunting and step-by-step explication - Steve Ellis unlocks the poetry with Eliot's own extensive prose writings as his main key. The result is illuminating for beginner and Eliot aficionado alike. The binary opposites at the centre of Eliot's oeuvre, tradition versus innovation, conservative versus radical, 'ideal' versus actuality, belief versus scepticism, are addressed with freshness and clarity. Ellis traces both the continuities and contrasts running through Eliot's poetic development. He deals deftly with important influences, Laforgue, Baudelaire, Dante, in accounts of the poetry full of original insight and argument, while efficiently familiarising newcomers with critical cruxes and contentious issues (misogyny, anti-semitism). He has particularly perceptive things to say about the development of Eliot's poetic style, from the 'witty' to the deliberate, from the self-possessed to the ascetic. There are many other things to admire in this guide, but in particular all Eliot scholars will henceforth need to take account of Ellis's persuasive argument about the thorny issue of the relationship between The Waste Land and its 'Notes'."
- Dr Gareth Reeves, Durham University, UK