Eliot's Dark Angel Intersections of Life and Art [Paperback]

Schuchard's critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how Eliot's personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of moral criticism in English literature. The book also erodes conventional attitudes toward Eliot's intellectual and spiritual development, showing how early and consistently his classical and religious sensibility manifests itself in his poetry and criticism. The book examines his reading, his teaching, his bawdy poems, and his life-long attraction to music halls and other modes of popular culture to show the complex relation between intellectual biography and art.

[The book] will be essential reading for professional scholars and critics writing about Eliot for some time to come....A treasure trove of information about Eliot's life and art....Empirical discoveries are rare indeed in literary criticism...Schuchard's discovery and publication of these documents revealed how much the young Eliot's famous critical pronouncements and poetic allusions owed to his routine class preparations....The definitive statement on Eliot's brief teaching career and its crucial relation to his development as a writer....Reconstructs Eliot's pop-cultural frame of reference in the 1910s and '20s. His love of the latest joke, the latest dance craze, and the latest outrage on middle-class sensibilities perpetrated by one visiting Continental avant-gardist or another enabled Eliot to tune his poetry to thezeitgeist, even as his private yearnings toward a medieval Christian faith tormented him. --Review

A work of literary criticism that actually lives up to the puffs on the dust jacket: `Beautifully written and exhaustively researched...it is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Eliot. --Virginia Quarterly Review

What a book! Ronald Schuchard...has the audacity to write lC�