The definitive edition of the published prose of the Nobel laureate, the most important poet-critic of modern times.

The Collected Prose presents those works that T. S. Eliot allowed to reach print in the order of their final revision or printing. Publishing across four volumes, the series aims to provide an authoritative and clean-text record of Eliot’s approved texts and their revisions, beginning with his formative observations, written while he was at high school, and concluding in his final major opus, To Criticize the Critic, published in the months after his death.

This second volume spans 1929 to 1934, a period in which Eliot’s poetry was maturing into the reflective verse of Animula, Ash Wednesday, and Marina. It was also a moment that confirmed his critical reputation with the publication of Selected Essays, reprinting and revising his most important essays on tradition and the individual talent, Hamlet, Marvell, and Dante, and culminating in the Harvard lectures that became The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

Thomas Stearns Eliot, a poet, critic, and publisher, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He settled in England in 1915, where for a few years he worked in the foreign section of Lloyds Bank. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. In 1922, he became editor of the literary journal The Criterion, publishing The Waste Land in its first outing. In 1925 Eliot was recruited by Geoffrey Faber to be the literary editor and a director of a new publishing house, Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). It was a role in which he excelled, going on to establish Faber as a leading publisher of poetry with a list that embraced the outstanding English-language poets of the twentieth century. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He continued to work at Faber until his death in 1965.