Jewel Spears Brooker

These expert studies in some of the key figures behind Eliot's modernism - Mallarme, Frazer, F.H. Bradley, and T.E. Hulme - yield fresh insights which are brought to bear most fruitfully on his major poems "Gerontion", "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets". A spacious and wide-ranging book by a scholar and teacher, is should be welcomed by other Eliot scholars and their students for the skill ...

There is no doubt that The Waste Land has been one of the most (if not the most) influential poetical works of this century. As Brooker and Bentley point out, the poem has been a benchmark used by critical schools of thought to illustrate their own strengths and the weaknesses of other schools. Because of this, and because of the poem's lasting place in education and richness of theme and lan...