University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Copyright © 1956, 1961, 1966 by the University of Minnesota
Printed in the United States of America
Blurb from the book jacket:
By bringing together the critical essays on T. S. Eliot, which Leonard Unger has written over a period of nearly three decades, this volume provides a cohesive view of the poet's work, illuminating and useful to both scholars and general readers. There are seven essays and an introduction in which Professor Unger places the essays in perspective, indicates something of their relationship to each other, and traces the development of his thinking about Eliot's poetry. In addition there is a selected bibliography of Eliot's major works and the important critical studies of him.
The critic Grover Smith writes:
Leonard Unger has studied the poetry of T. S. Eliot longer, and I imagine more deeply, than most of us in his generation. His early essays inspired me even when I first read them. His later essays sometimes give me the experience of l'esprit d'escalier--'Why couldn't I have thought of that?' He is a scrupulous critic, but more, I think, scholar than critic; yet a good critic, though it is for his scholarship that I as a scholar prefer to praise him and must envy him.
As the author explains in the introduction, all but two of the essays are concerned with details selected from the larger body of Eliot's work, and the criticism has developed from an awareness that one or another set of these details yielded a pattern. He writes
Such patterns are interwoven with each other and are finally to be seen as parts of that larger pattern which is the entire work. . . . The poet's life is closed, but in his work 'the pattern is new in every moment.'Leonard Unger is a professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is one of the editors of the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers and the author of the pamphlet T. S. Eliot. Among his books is The Man in the Name: Essays on the Experience of Poetry
Contents:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[Information not printed in book]
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-27420
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